EA Forum Podcast (All audio): Recent Episodes
EA Forum Team
Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts, posts with 30+ karma, and other great writing.
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This is my personal take, not an organizational one. Originally written May 2025, revived for Draft Amnesty Week.
When I discovered the beginnings of EA, it felt like coming home. I had finally found a group of people who cared as much as I did about saving lives.
When I discovered rationality not long after, it felt new. The intensity of LessWrong was both offputting and fascinating to me, and I read a lot of the site in the summer of 2011. I had studied sociology and was used to thinking in terms of ethics and emotions, but not in terms of statistics or economics. LessWrongers were picky and disagreeable, but I learned reasoning skills from them.
Before EA even had a name, LessWrong was one of the best places to talk about ideas now associated with EA. My first post in 2011 was about what would [...]
First published:
October 13th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Cd6pct5CADkDjwhoz/i-m-an-ea-who-benefitted-from-rationality
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. I’m a journalist covering animal suffering in agriculture.
Yesterday, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story from "Chicks on Speed: Big Chicken's Push for Faster Birds, But Slower Reform", a cross-border investigation I’ve been working on with five other European journalists: Julia Dauksza, Tracy Keeling, Wojciech Oleksiak, Andrei Petre and Paul Tullis. This work was made possible by the support from Journalismfund Europe.
More about the investigation
So far, our work has been published in Bloomberg Businessweek, Le Parisien, UFC-Que Choisir, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Mindcraft Stories. Two additional articles are expected in the coming months.
Eurogroup for Animals wrote a blogpost about the investigation: "Plight of fast-growing meat chickens hits mainstream media".
Bloomberg Businessweek agreed to produce a short social video about the story. They also released an audio version for Spotify and will use it as their Sunday newsletter this week.
The beautiful [...]
Outline:
(01:42) Key findings
(03:57) Behind the story
(05:14) Whats next
First published:
October 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SW498uDwbQMvguzae/bloomberg-businessweek-how-generations-of-selective-breeding
Linkpost URL:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-09/chicken-breeding-by-aviagen-cobb-vantress-shows-risks-of-genetic-selection
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Today, I became vegan.
Just 24 hours ago, I couldn’t have imagined this would be the case — at least not so soon.
Reading Óscar Horta's Making A Stand For Animals[1] (MASFA, from now on) hit me like a freight train as I turned page after page, chapter after chapter. Now there was something I could no longer unsee — something that compelled me to act in accordance.
Internally, this feels like the first major moral decision I’ve made in my life. I had made important decisions before to align with my values. Volunteering, joining Effective Altruism, committing to upskilling in AI Safety rather than pursuing a Master's or a conventional job, taking the 10% Pledge, saying “yes” to helping run an EA university group.
It's not that these weren’t hard decisions, but they didn’t feel like hard moral decisions. They involved practical challenges, but they simply felt like [...]
Outline:
(01:38) I
(03:27) II
(05:55) III
(09:11) IV
(09:57) V
(11:28) Being vegan as a case of EA in practice
First published:
October 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bG9qqPWMrGdDDJEt5/the-5-obstacles-i-had-to-overcome-to-become-vegan
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TLDR: Through the end of October, we are giving $3 (Up to $5k total) to The Humane League for each new person who tries out Tab for Ending Animal Suffering . It is a free browser extension that uses a few ads on your new tab page to raise money for non-profits. In the post, I share a little bit about what we've learned so far, and also ask for ideas on places to get the word out.
As a longtime forum lurker, I'm excited to make my first post and share my newest project: Tab for Ending Animal Suffering. (In October, we are running a campaign where $3 will go to The Humane League for each new person who signs up, so it is a great time to try it out!)
I'm the co-founder of Tab for a Cause, and over the years, we've raised just shy [...]
Outline:
(02:36) Interesting Learnings so Far
(05:54) Help + Feedback
First published:
October 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gFkWJKg6Svsbxur3C/you-can-raise-usd3-for-the-humane-league-just-by-clicking
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Acknowledgements: A huge thank you to the Hive team and the many community builders who have shared their wisdom with us over the years. This post is an attempt to synthesize those lessons. Special thanks to Therese Veith, Gergő Gáspár, Sam Chapman, Sarah Tegeler, and John Salter for reviewing this post. All mistakes and oversights are our own.
TL;DR: This post walks through some of our key insights from building Hive, a global community for farmed animal advocates, and other communities within and outside of the EA space. We walk through a three-phase approach to community building, and extensive notes in the footnotes. In short:
- Phase 0: Solve a Problem, Don't Just Start a Group. Before you build anything, a specific group of people needs a compelling reason to gather.
- Phase 1: The Cold Start Problem & Initial Growth. Obsessing over your first users, doing unscalable things to provide value, and [...]
Outline:
(00:35) TL;DR:
(01:58) Why Were Writing This
(02:42) Phase 0: Solve a Problem, Dont Just Start a Group (Before you launch)
(04:28) Phase 1: The Cold Start Problem & Initial Growth (Months 0-3)
(07:19) Phase 2: Scaling, Setting up Systems, and Navigating the Messy Middle (Months 3-12)
(11:19) Phase 3: Maintaining and Supporting the Ecosystem (12+ months)
(14:28) Knowing When to Stop or Sunset
(15:44) Common Pitfalls to Avoid
(18:07) Share Your Journey
(18:49) Appendix: Quick Start Checklist
First published:
October 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SaaLXZv9aobdHcQZA/building-an-impact-focused-community
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
About AIM
Ambitious Impact (AIM), formerly Charity Entrepreneurship, launches organizations that cost-effectively improve human and animal lives at scale.
Since 2018, we’ve incubated over 50 charities, now estimated to improve the lives of more than 75 million people and 1 billion animals worldwide. Our alumni have been backed by GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, and Animal Charity Evaluators.
We believe that talented, dedicated entrepreneurs can solve the world's biggest problems using evidence, innovation, and a focus on cost-effective impact.
Our Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program currently launches ~10 nonprofits per year. In 2026, we aim to double this to 20. Our biggest bottleneck? Finding the best people and the best ideas.
That's where you come in.
Roles: Research Managers & Recruitment Manager
We’re hiring across two pivotal teams:
- Research Managers – Identify and evaluate the most promising, evidence-based ideas for new high-impact charities.
- Recruitment Manager – Find [...]
Outline:
(00:12) About AIM
(01:10) Roles: Research Managers & Recruitment Manager
(01:50) Key Details
(02:36) About the Research Roles
(04:19) About the Recruitment Role
(06:03) What We Offer
(06:49) Want to learn more?
(07:05) Apply Now
First published:
October 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8oHjh4ttMdaRqiZaZ/ambitious-impact-aim-is-hiring-for-research-and-recruitment
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. A conversation with Paul Scharre, author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, who joins us to talk about
- how AI's superhuman command and control abilities will change the battlefield
- why offense/defense balance isn’t a well-defined concept
- “race to the bottom” dynamics for autonomous weapons
- how a US/taiwan conlict in the age of drones might play out
- and more…
Transcript
Rai Sur 00:00:36
Today we’re speaking with Paul Scharre. Paul is the Executive Vice President at the Center for a New American Security and the author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. He also formerly worked at the Pentagon on emerging technologies. Welcome, Paul.
Paul Scharre 00:00:52
Thanks for having me.
Rai Sur 00:00:53
We’re also joined by Sentinel forecaster and co-founder Nuno Sempere, Sentinel Superforecaster Lisa, and Superforecaster Scott Eastman, whose specialty is in geopolitics, epidemiology [...]
First published:
October 9th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4DeWPdPeBmJsEGJJn/interview-with-a-drone-expert-on-the-future-of-ai-warfare
Linkpost URL:
https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/how-strategic-ai-will-revolutionize
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post is based on a memo I wrote for this year's Meta Coordination Forum. See also Arden Koehler's recent post, which hits a lot of similar notes.
Summary
The EA movement stands at a crossroads. In light of AI's very rapid progress, and the rise of the AI safety movement, some people view EA as a legacy movement set to fade away; others think we should refocus much more on “classic” cause areas like global health and animal welfare.
I argue for a third way: EA should embrace the mission of making the transition to a post-AGI society go well, significantly expanding our cause area focus beyond traditional AI safety. This means working on neglected areas like AI welfare, AI character, AI persuasion and epistemic disruption, human power concentration, space governance, and more (while continuing work on global health, animal welfare, AI safety, and biorisk).
These additional [...]
Outline:
(00:20) Summary
(02:38) Three possible futures for the EA movement
(07:07) Reason #1: Neglected cause areas
(10:49) Reason #2: EA is currently intellectually adrift
(13:08) Reason #3: The benefits of EA mindset for AI safety and biorisk
(14:53) This isn't particularly Will-idiosyncratic
(15:57) Some related issues
(16:10) Principles-first EA
(17:30) Cultivating vs growing EA
(21:27) PR mentality
(24:48) What I'm not saying
(28:31) What to do?
(29:00) Local groups
(31:26) Online
(35:18) Conferences
(36:05) Conclusion
First published:
October 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/R8AAG4QBZi5puvogR/effective-altruism-in-the-age-of-agi
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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We think there are many impactful roles out there that aren’t sufficiently on people's radar, to the detriment of both people looking to get hired and orgs looking to hire them. Because of that, we’ve been working to significantly scale and improve our job board, especially in the context of underrepresented opportunities (across cause areas, regions, and orgs that we think are currently not getting enough attention in EA).
So far, we’ve prioritized increasing the number and diversity of roles (to 800+, up around 3x what we originally had). We plan to keep adding a lot more roles, and also improving the functionality of the board in various ways (with email alerts as a top priority at the moment).
Here's how you can help us help you:
- If you land a role that you found on the job board, please let us know! (Or even if you're finding roles [...]
First published:
October 9th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WgfzxAByug2mNbJFF/we-re-scaling-our-job-board-to-help-people-find-impactful
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. When will artificial intelligence (AI) match top human forecasters at predicting the future? In a recent podcast episode, Nate Silver predicted 10–15 years. Tyler Cowen disagreed, expecting a 1–2 year timeline. Who's more likely to be right?
Today, the Forecasting Research Institute is excited to release an update to ForecastBench—our benchmark tracking how well large language models (LLMs) forecast real-world events—with evidence that bears directly on this debate. We’re also opening the benchmark for submissions.
First published:
October 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5vB2xGgXf7kAAbsF9/how-well-can-large-language-models-predict-the-future
Linkpost URL:
https://forecastingresearch.substack.com/p/ai-llm-forecasting-model-forecastbench-benchmark
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
(Context: I’m not an expert in animal welfare. My aim is to sketch a potentially neglected perspective on prioritization, not to give highly reliable object-level advice.)
SummaryWe seem to be clueless about our long-term impact. We might therefore consider it more robust to focus on neartermist causes, in particular animal welfare.[1] But if we also take seriously our deep uncertainty about our impact on animals, what implications does this have for animal welfare prioritization?
This post will explain:
- why I think we could be clueless about even the near-term impact of many animal welfare interventions (more);
- what criteria I think an intervention must satisfy to be robust to near-term cluelessness (more); and
- how these criteria compare to existing approaches to robustness (more).
Practical takeaways for cost-effectiveness analyses:
- Include estimates of key backfire effects (more), such as:
- large increases in populations of wild animals with net-negative [...]
Outline:
(00:22) Summary
(02:28) Introduction
(06:59) Principles for a cluelessness-robust intervention
(07:11) 1. Accounts for robust backfire effects
(07:30) Example
(09:07) More detail
(12:53) 2. Doesn't depend on arbitrary estimates
(12:58) Example
(14:50) More detail
(18:00) 3. Accounts for unknown unknowns
(18:05) Example
(19:13) More detail
(24:08) Comparison to other approaches to robustness in cause prioritization
(27:21) Conclusion and future directions
(30:16) Acknowledgments
First published:
October 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8Y9byyfpBpjGiW5mG/what-to-do-about-near-term-cluelessness-in-animal-welfare
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. Disclaimers: I am a computational physicist, not a machine learning expert: set your expectations of accuracy accordingly. All my text in this post is 100% human-written without AI assistance.
Introduction:
The threat of human destruction by AI is generally regarded by longtermists as the most important cause facing humanity. The essay collection “essays on longtermism” includes two essays arguing in favour of this hypothesis: this essay is primarily a response to the latter essay by Richard Ngo and Adam Bales.
Ngo and Bales argue that we should be concerned about an AI that would “disempower humanity and perhaps cause our extinction”. Rather than focussing on the whole chain of reasoning, they focus on one step of the argument: that some AI systems will learn to become scheming deceivers that go on to try and destroy humanity.
In the essay, Ngo and Bales make a fairly [...]
Outline:
(04:18) Part 1: Why AI may be lazy, deceitful and sycophantic
(28:29) Part 2: the implications of lazy, deceitful, sycophantic AI
(37:58) Summary and conclusion
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 7th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/shcMvRatuzZxZ3fui/how-ai-may-become-deceitful-sycophantic-and-lazy
Linkpost URL:
https://titotal.substack.com/p/how-ai-may-become-deceitful-sycophantic
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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The following is a quick collection of forecasting markets and opinions from experts which give some sense of how well-informed people are thinking about the state of US democracy. This isn't meant to be a rigorous proof that this is the case (DM me for that), just a collection which I hope will get people thinking about what's happening in the US now.
Before looking at the forecasts you might first ask yourself:
- What probability would I put on authoritarian capture?, and
- At what probability of authoritarian capture would I think that more concern and effort is warranted?
Forecasts[1]
- The US won’t be a democracy by 2030: 25% - Metaculus
- Will Trump 2.0 be the end of Democracy as we know it?: 48% - Manifold
- If Trump is elected, will the US still be a liberal democracy at the end of his term? (V-DEM): 61% [...]
Outline:
(00:45) Forecasts
(01:50) Quotes from experts & commentators
(03:20) Some relevant research
First published:
October 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eJNH2CikC4scTsqYs/experts-and-markets-think-authoritarian-capture-of-the-us
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In September 2025 in Warsaw prior to CARE, 19 animal movement leaders came together to participate in the first ever AGI and animal welfare wargame.
It was a strategic tabletop exercise designed to test whether current animal-advocacy theories of change held under fast AI progression and geopolitical stress. Participants were selected based on their potential strategic influence on the direction of the animal movement and assigned roles according to their pre-existing domain expertise which ranged from governments, frontier AI labs, animal agriculture companies, alternative-protein companies, animal advocates, funders, and media. They were then given an [amateurly] forecasted starting scenario and asked to stay in character while interacting and negotiating with one another over 4 rounds and 3 hours.
Participants of AGIxAnimals gathered in Warsaw This exercise was adapted from the AI-2027 tabletop exercise, which we ran once exactly “as is” to understand the game mechanics. We then ran [...]
Outline:
(01:27) Why we ran it
(02:22) What is in this write up
(02:56) Scenario in brief
(03:27) Game Highlights
(09:07) Participant Reflections
(10:31) Take-Home Messages
(13:00) Reference materials
(14:19) Acknowledgements
First published:
October 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/k3inf3qkRpWurqE5q/agi-animals-wargame
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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A pandemic that's substantially worse than COVID-19 is a seriouspossibility. If one happens, having a good mask could save your life.A high quality reusable mask is only $30 to$60, and I think it's well worth it to buy one for yourself.Worth it enough that I think you should order one now if you don'thave one already.
But if you're not convinced, let's do some rough estimation.
COVID-19 killed about 0.2% of people (20Mof 8B). The 1918 flu killed more like 2.5% (50Mof 2B). Estimating from two data points is fraught, but this givesyou perhaps a 0.02% annual chance of dying in a pandemic. Engineeringcouldmake this much worse, especially given progress in AI, but let's setthat aside for now to make a more conservative case.
A reusable mask ("elastomeric respirator") would be really valuable [...]
First published:
October 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o3fAeDAComexCiNRx/you-should-get-a-reusable-mask
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Summary
We’re launching the fifth round of Meta Charity Funders — a selective funding opportunity for promising meta charities, i.e. organisations that support or mobilise others to have a large positive impact. Last round (Spring 2025), MCF awarded ~$550k to 10 charities, including effective giving initiatives and specialised community- and capacity-building groups.
Apply for funding by October 31st 23:59 GMT or join the circle as a funder (more information below)!
We expect all applicants to have read this post carefully, as well as “Meta Charity Funders: What you need to know when applying” to understand how to write your application. The application method has been modified compared to last round, but previous materials published on the EA forum will still give relevant context.
Eligibility criteria
- (Strict) You operate as a meta charity, i.e. you are one step removed from direct impact. The outcomes of your work are designed [...]
Outline:
(00:15) Summary
(01:10) Eligibility criteria
(02:15) Historical funding areas
(02:54) What makes for a competitive application?
(04:15) Information for this round
(04:19) Process
(04:56) Historical support
(05:27) Join as a funder
First published:
October 4th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iGbjS2zQpCKEkRBqR/request-for-proposals-meta-charity-funders-fall-2025
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Chana Messinger (80k's head of video, formerly of CEA's Community Health team) and I (Matt Reardon, formerly of 80k) have been recording Expected Volume (Apple, Spotify),[1] a podcast of unscripted conversations between us and and some great guests from across the community, including:
- Andy Masley
- Phil Trammell
- Conor Barnes
- Daniel Filan
- Alex Lawsen
- Trevor Levin
- Julia Wise
Topics vary widely, but we often touch on EA history, community dynamics, politics, and religion, with some personal revelations about us and our guests mixed in. Some highlights include:
- Chana being very gracious with my episode-long critique of her whole job (making AI-first YouTube videos for 80k)
- Phil Trammell explaining why equities consistently go up (and why you shouldn’t "just buy all the stocks”)
- Andy Masley on his burgeoning environmental impacts of AI work on his incredible blog which you should all read
- Julia Wise answering the question of whether [...]
Outline:
(02:22) Theory of change
(04:32) Feedback
First published:
October 7th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c2Dm8fooi3LwkmtDt/free-wheeling-personality-driven-ea-conversations
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Housekeeping notes:
- This was hastily written; there might be some bad phrasing here and there – Forgive me!
- This advice may not apply to everyone. It was inspired a lot by my personal experience moving away from research and into “other” roles in AI safety, starting around September 2024.
- I’ve previously written a little bit about why I’ve enjoyed fieldbuilding and why I’ve found it valuable in the bottom of this other post as well)
_____
TLDR: Non-research roles in AI safety don't appear to get enough attention, despite a lot of professional benefits that they offer (e.g. skillbuilding in neglected-yet-important skills like people management; higher impact). People who might otherwise be interested in AI safety research careers could consdier more atypical roles (and many of these can still feel "research adjacent"!)
_____
In 2024, I made a decision to move across the ocean and start a new [...]
First published:
October 6th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dQirWPSdLHBfrHCiJ/aspiring-ai-safety-researchers-consider-atypical-jobs-in-the
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Note to competition judges: feedback extremely welcome!
Preface
Relationship to "The Case for Strong Longtermism"
This post engages with themes central to Greaves and MacAskill's "The Case for Strong Longtermism" in Essays on Longtermism, offering not a refutation but an important reframing of how we should think about far-future moral priorities. While Greaves and MacAskill compellingly argue that far-future effects dominate the moral importance of our actions today, my argument suggests that the quality and trajectory of future lives, and specifically whether they contain extreme suffering that crosses or comes near a threshold of non-offsetability, should be the predominant longtermist concern.
In Section 6 ("Robustness of the argument"), Greaves and MacAskill briefly touch on variations in axiology, including risk aversion and prioritarianism, noting these might actually strengthen rather than weaken the case for longtermism. My thesis extends this line of thinking much further: if some suffering genuinely cannot be [...]
Outline:
(00:16) Preface
(02:15) Intro
(03:05) How to read this post
(03:47) Part I: The logical claim
(03:55) A brief aside
(04:42) 1. Introduction: what we take for granted
(05:32) 2. The meaning of utilitarianism and the hidden sixth premise
(05:53) The Utilitarian Core
(06:59) What is left out
(07:34) Representation premise.
(08:56) 3. Why real-number representation isnt obvious
(09:02) What utilitarianism actually requires
(09:40) Where cardinality might hold (and where it might not)
(10:55) Alternative mathematical structures
(12:17) The point
(13:46) 4. The VNM (non-) problem
(17:51) Not an epistemic red flag
(18:46) Part II: The metaphysical claim
(19:00) 5. The argument from idealized rational preferences
(19:05) The setup: you are everyone
(20:05) The question
(21:43) The burden of idealization
(23:02) What this reveals
(23:29) Not a proof
(24:32) 6. The implications of universal offsetability are especially implausible
(25:49) The moral difference
(27:16) 7. The asymptote is the radical part
(28:41) Why instruments?
(30:03) The compensation schedules structure
(30:49) Why this Is already radical
(32:25) 8. Continuity and the location of the threshold
(33:33) Where the threshold falls
(34:14) 9. From arbitrarily large to infinite: a small step
(36:05) 10. The phenomenology of extreme suffering
(38:29) 11. Addressing major objections
(38:44) Time-granularity problem
(40:08) Extremely small probabilities of terrible outcomes
(41:52) Evolutionary explanations of intuitive asymmetry
(44:04) Doesnt this endorse destroying the world?
(48:54) General principle
(49:14) 12. Conclusion
(49:18) Implications
(49:54) We keep whats compelling
(50:52) We drop whats implausible
First published:
October 5th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/je5TiYESSv53tWHC9/utilitarians-should-accept-that-some-suffering-cannot-be-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Nightmares of Nature offers a shocking and novel twist on the classic wildlife doc, turning it into a horror movie seen from the point of view of the individual animals.
Nature is full of wonder, but it's also full of bone-chilling monsters.
Will our animal heroes survive this wildlife horror story or meet a grizzly end?
The first episode follows a pregnant mouse who has to navigate a scary world of predators in order to find a safe place to give birth…
The Netflix trailer is here, and the full series has just gone live here.
First published:
October 5th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B9Z3epTLzCiKJazca/a-new-netflix-series-just-dropped-on-wild-animal-suffering
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Here's a talk I gave at an EA university group organizers’ retreat recently, which I've been strongly encouraged to share on the forum. I'd like to make it clear I don't recommend or endorse everything discussed in this talk (one example in particular which hopefully will be self-evident), but do think serious shifts in how we engage with ethics and EA would be quite beneficial for the world.
Part 1: Taking ethics seriously
To set context for this talk, I want to go through an Our World in Data style birds-eye view of how things are trending across key issues often discussed in EA. This is to help get better intuitions for questions like “How well will the future go by default?” and “Is the world on track to eventually solve the most pressing problems?” - which can inform high-level strategy questions like “Should we generally be doing more [...]
Outline:
(00:32) Part 1: Taking ethics seriously
(04:26) Incentive shifts and moral progress
(05:07) What is incentivized by society?
(07:08) Heroic Responsibility
(11:30) Excerpts from Strangers drowning
(14:37) Opening our eyes to what is unbearable
(18:07) Increasing effectiveness vs. increasing altruism
(20:20) Cognitive dissonance
(21:27) Paragons of moral courage
(23:15) The monk who set himself on fire to protect Buddhism, and didn't flinch an inch
(27:46) What do I most deeply want to honour in this life?
(29:43) Moral Courage and defending EA
(31:55) Acknowledging opportunity cost and grappling with guilt
(33:33) Part 2: Enjoying the process
(33:38) Celebrating what's really beautiful - what our hearts care about
(42:08) Enjoying effective altruism
(44:43) Training our minds to cultivate the qualities we endorse
(46:54) Meditation isnt a silver bullet
(52:35) The timeless words of MLK
First published:
October 4th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gWyvAQztk75xQvRxD/taking-ethics-seriously-and-enjoying-the-process
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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The Standard Reading If you've heard of Le Guin's ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, you probably know the basic idea. It's a go-to story for discussions of utilitarianism and its downsides. A paper calls it “the infamous objection brought up by Ursula Le Guin”. It shows up in university ‘Criticism of Utilitarianism' syllabi and is used for classroom material alongside the Trolley Problem. The story is often also more broadly read as a parable about global inequality, the comfortable rich countries built on the suffering of the poor, and our decision to not walk away from our own complicity.
If you haven't read ‘Omelas’, I suggest you stop here and read it now[1]. It's a short 5-page read, and I find it beautifully written and worth reading.
The rest of this post will contain spoilers.
The popular reading goes something like: Omelas is a perfect city whose [...]
Outline:
(00:10) The Standard Reading
(01:14) The Correct (?) Reading
(02:28) The First Question
(03:51) The Second Question
(04:34) The Misreading Is Perfect
(06:27) Le Guin Disagrees
First published:
October 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ryf83CktjJFFKpLJh/omelas-is-perfectly-misread
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. TL;DR: Mox, a community space and incubator in San Francisco, is offering 2x/month complimentary access to members of AI safety orgs, and other causes we admire.
Current partners of the Mox Guest Program include:
- ARC
- MIRI
- Elicit
- GovAI
- FAR AI
- Seldon Labs
- Tarbell Fellowship
- Redwood Research
- Lightcone Infrastructure
and a few other private partners.
What we’re offering
We’re looking to partner with aligned orgs, to make it easy for their staff to drop by when they’re in SF. This works especially well for:
- People who work elsewhere but occasionally visit SF and want a place to work
- Those who have offices but want access to a community space on evenings and weekends
- Anyone looking to exchange ideas with other folks working on AI safety
While in the space, guest program members are full Mox members. They’re welcome to join members-only events and to [...]
Outline:
(00:45) What we're offering
(01:33) Why we're doing this
(01:54) What people say about Mox
(03:42) How to join
First published:
October 1st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gmfFDhqw24otdm7NJ/introducing-the-mox-guest-program
Linkpost URL:
https://moxsf.com/guests
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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This is a link post. Biological risks are more severe than has been widely appreciated. Recent discussions of mirror bacteria highlight an extreme scenario: a single organism that could infect and kill humans, plants, and animals, exhibits environmental persistence in soil or dust, and might be capable of spreading worldwide within several months. In the worst-case scenario, this could pose an existential risk to humanity, especially if the responses/countermeasures were inadequate.
Less severe pandemic pathogens could still cause hundreds of millions (or billions) of casualties if they were engineered to cause harm. Preventing such catastrophes should be a top priority for humanity. However, if prevention fails, it would also be prudent to have a backup plan.
One way of doing this would be to enumerate the types of pathogens that might be threatening (e.g. viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc), enumerate the subtypes (e.g. adenoviruses, coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses, etc), analyze the [...]
Outline:
(04:20) PPE
(09:56) Biohardening
(14:36) Detection
(17:00) Expression of interest and acknowledgements
The original text contained 34 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/33t5jPzxEcFXLCPjq/the-four-pillars-a-hypothesis-for-countering-catastrophic
Linkpost URL:
https://defensesindepth.bio/the-four-pillars-a-hypothesis-for-countering-catastrophic-biological-risk/
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
If you just want a link to the video, watch it here!
Watch nowWhat's AI in Context? (Skip if you already know) AI in Context is 80,000 Hours’ new(ish) Youtube channel, hosted by Aric Floyd. We’re trying to do high production storytelling that also informs people about transformative AI and its risks (but there's a lot of paths our future strategy could take). We talk about our launch more here.
The MechaHitler video Probably the EA Forum disproportionately knows what MechaHitler is, but not everyone is terminally online, so, a summary:
Earlier this year, Elon Musk's AI model, Grok, which can interact with users and post directly to Twitter, suddenly turned from being a fairly neutral commentator on events to a sexually harassing, Nazi-minded troll calling itself ‘MechaHitler’.
Our new video is about that incident and how it happened, which means talking about what specifically happened (an accidental system [...]
Outline:
(00:20) What's AI in Context? (Skip if you already know)
(00:45) The MechaHitler video
(01:29) Why this?
(03:29) Logistics (only read if you're interested)
(04:24) Strategy and future of the video program
(05:29) Subscribing and sharing
(05:53) Request for feedback
First published:
October 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/trh4Km9KRedYSn3K3/the-day-elon-musk-s-ai-became-a-nazi-and-what-it-means-for
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
By Robert WiblinWatch on YoutubeListen on SpotifyRead the transcript Episode summary
If we can get their cost down to $10, this becomes one of the most cost-effective ways of preventing respiratory transmission. The shelf life is 20 years. That means basically 50 cents per person per year of protection. …
If you’re a government it makes a lot of sense to just stockpile enough to cover your entire population. Right now we spend about $10 billion a year on missile defence. Stockpiling one of these for every single person in the US would be 1% the cost of that.
— Andrew Snyder-Beattie
Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult bordering on impossible, making bioweapons humanity's single greatest vulnerability. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom could be wrong.
Andrew's job at Open Philanthropy is to spend [...]
Outline:
(00:28) Episode summary
(03:59) The interview in a nutshell
(04:25) 1. Two primary classes of biological threats could pose an existential risk
(05:27) 2. The four pillars plan offers a robust, defence-in-depth strategy
(08:22) 3. Other catastrophic biorisks, like agricultural collapse, are less concerning
(09:21) 4. We urgently need entrepreneurial people to execute this plan
(10:17) Highlights
(10:20) The worst-case scenario: mirror bacteria
(15:44) Why antibiotics arent enough to fight mirror bacteria
(18:58) The most cost-effective way governments could prevent respiratory transmission among their populations
(22:17) Why Andrew works on biorisks rather than AI
(26:54) Everyone was wrong: biorisks are defence dominant in the limit
(32:23) The four pillars plan -- and how listeners can help
First published:
October 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JopMdWgtthCbEFxk2/andrew-snyder-beattie-on-the-low-tech-plan-to-patch-humanity
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Crosspost of my blog.
Lots of people have two conflicting desires:
- Do the most good.
- Make sure you do some good.
These are in conflict. Sometimes the thing that does the most good in expectation has a low chance of doing any good. If you give a lot of money to shrimp, for example, there's about a 50% chance you’re wasting your money if it turns out that shrimp aren’t conscious. Similarly, if you take Pascal's wager, and give money to groups that effectively promote the religion you think is most likely to be true, there's a non-trivial chance that you’re not doing any good at all! And the same thing is true of other speculative proposals for improving the world—trying to become a billionaire, giving to Longtermist organizations that safeguard the future, and so on.
As it happens, I don’t think this attempt to make sure [...]
First published:
September 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eB9weiLvPo7sKcLZH/diversify-your-moral-risk-portfolio
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Context:
The EU is currently considering introducing a ban on companies in Europe from using terms like ‘meat’, ‘steak’, ‘burger’, ‘sausage’, et cetera in plant based food labels. The proposal would also restrict the use of meat related terms for future cultivated meat products yet to enter the market.
Similar measures had previously been debated in 2020, but these were ultimately voted against due to widespread negative attention in the international press.
There is a possibility that the ban going ahead could materially alter the consumption patterns of European citizens away from plant based foods and towards intensively reared meat, based on the perception that the latter is more ‘natural’. Given the population of the EU (450 million) even a small percentage changes in consumption habits could lock-in suffering for billions of animals.
Opportunity for impact:
Please consider signing the following open-letter opposing the proposed ban:
For organisations [...]
First published:
October 1st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pLQdvGjbaPvXbX5ob/open-letter-to-stop-the-eu-s-ban-on-fake-meat-labels
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
0. Key Info
TL;DR: Most students get <20% of the potential value of EAG due to poor/ insufficient preparation. Students should ideally spend 15-20 hours (4-6 absolute minimum) identifying career uncertainties, creating concrete options, setting SMART goals, then booking and prepping 15+ meetings around those goals.
Epistemic status: This guidance is based on what has worked well for me in my ~5 EAG attendances as a student. I have 80% that ~80% students will benefit from following all the steps, but if you've spent 20+ minutes on a step and it's not proving valuable, you should move on!
Rough draft caveat: I spent a total of 1.5hrs writing this: I wish I could polish and expand on my thinking more, but I wanted to post sufficiently before EAG so that people have the time to actually use it!
- Motivation behind this doc If done right, time [...]
Outline:
(00:11) 0. Key Info
(01:10) 1. Motivation behind this doc
(02:04) 2. The Steps
(02:25) 2.1. Identify uncertainties and make a best-guess (2-4hrs)
(03:52) 2.2. Know what potential options you have for how to spend your time (1-2hrs)
(04:38) 2.3. Create a skeleton of career options (1-2hrs)
(05:07) 2.4. Create goals (1-2hrs)
(06:06) 2.5. Send meeting requests (2-4hrs)
(06:40) 2.6. Prep those meetings! (2-4hrs)
(07:25) 3. Quick Tips for making the most of EAG
(08:13) 4. Wrap-up the meetings, make plans, set deadlines (1-3hrs)
First published:
September 30th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JogTnCmzEbJkYWjre/maximising-eag-value-as-a-student
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 53 on September 29. I think it's a pretty great step, though I certainly hope future legislation builds on it.
I wrote up my understanding of what the text actually does; I welcome any corrections (and certainly further analysis for what this all means for AI safety)!
Very short summary
The law requires major AI companies to:
- Publish a frontier AI framework describing how the developer “approaches” assessing and mitigating catastrophic risks, defined as risks of death/serious injury to >50 people or >$1B in damage from a single incident related to CBRN uplift, autonomous crime, or loss of control, and keep the published version of the framework up to date.
- Publish model cards summarizing the assessments of catastrophic risks from the model, the role of third parties in those assessments, and how the frontier AI framework was implemented.
- Report to California's Office of Emergency [...]
Outline:
(00:32) Very short summary
(02:22) Longer summary
(02:25) What the bill requires of large frontier developers
(07:38) Other notes about the bill
First published:
September 29th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b9PMBwQddu9awtmHs/what-sb-53-california-s-new-ai-law-does
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Metaculus is looking for an experienced leader from the consulting world to grow our consulting practice, helping organizations use forecasting to make better decisions on critical global challenges.
- Find the full job description and apply here.
- Start Date: As soon as possible, but with significant flexibility for the right candidate.
- Location: Global/remote (must be available during core team collaboration hours of 8 AM to 12 PM Pacific time).
- Compensation: $200-250k USD base salary plus additional performance-based compensation and company equity.
- Referral Fee: If you’re not a good fit, but know someone who is, we're offering a $3,000 referral fee (paid after 3 months of employment) for successful connections.
Why This Role Matters
Metaculus has established itself as a leading public forecasting platform, and we've seen increasing demand from governments, NGOs, think tanks, and corporations that want to harness collective intelligence for decision-making on complex challenges. From geopolitical risk to frontier [...]
Outline:
(01:05) Why This Role Matters
(02:51) What Were Looking For
(03:58) Details
(04:43) Get in Touch
First published:
September 26th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5HYb7wk6uyaqqPT23/metaculus-is-hiring-a-head-of-consulting-services
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TL;DR - AIM's applicants skew towards global health & development. We’ve recommended four new animal welfare charities, have the capacity to launch all four, but expect to struggle to find the talent to do so. If you’ve considered moving into animal welfare work, applying to Charity Entrepreneurship to launch a new charity in the space could be of huge counterfactual value.
Part 1: Why you should launch an animal welfare charity
Our existing animal charities have had a lot of impact—improving the lives of over 1 billion animals worldwide. - from Shrimp Welfare Project securing corporate commitments globally and featuring on the Daily Show, to FarmKind's recent success coordinating a $2 million dollar fundraiser for the animal movement on the Dwarkshesh podcast, not to mention the progress of the 40 person army at the Fish Welfare Initiative, Scale Welfare's direct hand-on work at fish farms, and Animal Policy [...]
Outline:
(00:37) Part 1: Why you should launch an animal welfare charity
(02:07) A few notes on counterfactual founder value
(05:57) Part 2 - The Charity Entrepreneurship Program & Our Latest Animal Welfare Ideas
(06:04) What is the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program?
(06:47) Our recommended animal welfare ideas for 2026
(07:10) 1. Driving supermarket commitments to shift diets away from meat
(07:58) 2. Securing scale-up funding for the alternative protein industry
(08:51) 3. Cage-free farming in the Middle East
(09:30) 4. Preventing painful injuries in laying hens
(10:02) Applications close on October 5th: Apply here.
First published:
September 29th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aeky2EWd32bjjPJqf/charity-entrepreneurship-is-bottlenecked-by-a-lack-of-great
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Even with a busy schedule, there are easy micro-volunteering actions you can take to support your local, national, or regional EA group as well as other EA organizations engaged in outreach and community building.
These small steps can fit “whenever, wherever” — and even brief acts of support can add up to meaningful impact.
Below are 15 concrete suggestions, each with a short explanation of why it matters to your group's mission.
- Invite a Friend to an Event or the Community
Why it matters: Many people get involved simply because someone asked them. In fact, about 41% of volunteers say they started because they were personally invited or asked to join. Inviting a friend or colleague to a meetup, an intro talk, or even into your group's Slack/WhatsApp channel is a quick action that can have a big ripple effect. That friend gets exposed to new ideas and our [...]
First published:
September 26th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HJHcTacia5DusR4ur/15-easy-low-effort-ways-to-support-your-ea-group
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Background
In my previous post, I discussed Cortical Labs, an Australian biocomputing startup. After achieving early success combining human neurons with silicon chips, Cortical Labs launched a commercial product strategy: selling biocomputers that contain living human neurons and offering “Wetware-as-a-Service” cloud access to their computing infrastructure. The company envisions broad commercialization of their products, across applications in AI systems, robotics, and military technology.[1] Their CEO has stated: “Ultimately, the goal for Cortical Labs is to be like Nvidia, which is to enable the creativity of other users to build on this technology.”[2]
In my post, I defined “brain farming” as the commercialization of novel forms of consciousness for computational purposes. I argued that while current biocomputing systems likely lack moral value, there is a strong case for taking preemptive action now to prevent the creation of a brain farming industry.
Proposal
I'm highly confident that action should be [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Background
(01:13) Proposal
(01:44) Scope of the Ban
(02:07) Argument
(03:37) Objections
(06:39) Conclusion
First published:
September 27th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FPsFBhCM3EGQ5rCCn/brain-farming-the-case-for-a-global-ban
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Cross-posted from Otherwise
Part of my job is being available as a “contact person” at some events. The main purpose is to address problems promptly if something happened at the event, but often I end up hearing from people who are stressed about something unrelated. Sometimes they need someone to listen to what's front-of-mind for them, which has included:
- They lost a pregnancy and they’re dreading people asking them about it
- Their marriage has fallen apart
- They just lost a family member to suicide
- They’re having a fight with their mother about whether to make an expensive flight to a family funeral
- Their baby is sick, their partner is handling it alone, and they need to decide whether to fly back early
- Somehow everything just feels wrong and embarrassing and they feel like crying
And sometimes I’ve been that person. I remember sitting down with a [...]
First published:
September 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/roKwRynk29YR2AvzJ/you-re-not-the-only-one-to-have-life-events-affect-work
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary The goal of this post is to analyze the growth of the technical and non-technical AI safety fields in terms of the number of organizations and number of FTEs working in these fields.
In 2022, I estimated that there were about 300 FTEs (full-time equivalents) working in the field of technical AI safety research and 100 on non-technical AI safety work (400 in total).
Based on updated data and estimates from 2025, I estimate that there are now approximately 600 FTEs working on technical AI safety and 500 FTEs working on non-technical AI safety (1100 in total).
Note that this post is an updated version of my old 2022 post Estimating the Current and Future Number of AI Safety Researchers.
Technical AI safety field growth analysis The first step for analyzing the growth of the technical AI safety field is to create a spreadsheet listing the names of [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Summary
(01:00) Technical AI safety field growth analysis
(03:57) Non-technical AI safety field growth analysis
(05:50) Acknowledgements
(06:01) Appendix
(06:20) Old and new dataset and model comparison
(07:05) Technical AI safety organizations table
(07:24) Non-technical AI safety organizations table
First published:
September 27th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7YDyziQxkWxbGmF3u/ai-safety-field-growth-analysis-2025
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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We're looking for two Research Managers and a Recruitment Manager to join our team from January 2026
Our bottleneck to launching more impactful nonprofits isn't funding – it's finding the right people and ideas.
We're seeking a Recruitment Manager to attract the next generation of exceptional founders and two Research Managers to identify the interventions they'll implement. With everything else in place to double our impact, these roles are the missing pieces that will help us launch 20+ organizations improving millions of human and animal lives in 2026.
Ready to be that crucial piece? Apply for our open roles by October 19.
Apply now As our Recruitment Manager, your mission is to find talent that will found field-leading and benchmark-setting nonprofits. You'll design marketing campaigns, evaluate thousands of applicants, and select the exceptional few who become founders of organizations improving millions of human and animal lives. [...]
First published:
September 26th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bCdLrx5DJnES3DLp9/aim-is-hiring
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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Animal advocates use a wide variety of approaches to help animals—from running corporate campaigns to get chickens out of cages, to researching wild animal welfare science, to influencing lawmakers to support plant-based policies. But which of these approaches are the most promising, and how can they be made more effective? Evaluating and comparing them is a monumental challenge—especially as our field has less empirical research available to guide decisions than other cause areas, such as global health and development.1
However, the animal advocacy evidence base is growing: On average, we add more than 100 articles to our Research Library each month. This is great news; however, it brings its own challenges. While we have always consulted existing research to inform our grantmaking and charity recommendation decisions, the increasing volume and complexity of research called for ACE to adopt a more systematic and dynamic approach to synthesizing results from empirical [...]
Outline:
(03:53) The Project
(05:17) The Research Process
(07:26) Limitations
(10:06) Acknowledgments
First published:
September 24th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nQN5YwvbdDEYzRuKn/introducing-better-for-animals-a-new-public-resource-for
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
To start off with, I’ve been vegan/vegetarian for the majority of my life.
I think that factory farming has caused more suffering than anything humans have ever done.
Yet, according to my best estimates, I think most animal-lovers should eat meat.
Here's why:
- It is probably unhealthy to be vegan. This affects your own well-being and your ability to help others.
- You can eat meat in a way that substantially reduces the suffering you cause to non-human animals
How to reduce suffering of the non-human animals you eat
I’ll start with how to do this because I know for me this was the biggest blocker. A friend of mine was trying to convince me that being vegan was hurting me, but I said even if it was true, it didn’t matter. Factory farming is evil and causes far more harm than the potential harm done to [...]
Outline:
(00:44) How to reduce suffering of the non-human animals you eat
(03:22) Being vegan is (probably) bad for your health
(12:32) Health is important for your well-being and the world's
First published:
September 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LxC2yEmvYvy2NStkQ/why-you-should-eat-meat-even-if-you-hate-factory-farming
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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(Link-post to https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19389 )
I've written a new paper some of you may be interested in. It was written in response to the problems arising in decision theory, economics, and ethics where standard approaches to evaluating an option leads to divergent sums or integrals. This makes it hard to evaluate and compare things like unending streams of value, when each option under consideration would standardly be assigned the value _+infty_. This leads theorists to develop a variety of conflicting approaches to making these comparisons and often even leads them to modify their theory of finite cases — adding things like a requirement for bounded utility or discounting of future utility in order to make the infinities go away.
I believe this problem is mainly caused by the use of the extended reals, which are an impoverished system of infinite numbers which is obviously not expressive enough to solve the [...]
First published:
September 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4FxCr3iqZPYa62pdM/evaluating-the-infinite
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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We’re building a frictionless way to turn everyday transactions into donations to the world's most effective charities, and we’re seeking funding and partners to accelerate our growth.
GoodWallet: Making Effective Giving Frictionless
We’re building GoodWallet, a digital wallet that makes donating to high-impact charities as simple and seamless as sending money to a friend. Our simple, flexible design supports a wide range of real-world uses, such as repayments between friends, tips for creators, business payments, and peer-to-peer fundraising. By embedding effective giving into everyday financial flows, we aim to unlock new counterfactual donations and introduce more people to the principles of effective altruism.
For more on our functionality and vision, see our last post from July:
🔗 GoodWallet: Turning Everyday Repayments into High-Impact Donations
Since launching in May 2025, we’ve grown to 150+ early users, processed $1,500+ in donations, and secured conditional 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship with SparkWell, allowing us [...]
Outline:
(00:22) GoodWallet: Making Effective Giving Frictionless
(01:33) The Core Team that Got Us Here
(02:24) How We Would Use Funding
(03:54) Our Theory of Change
(04:20) Please Reach Out
First published:
September 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kDzxEfLqQz9EjA7um/goodwallet-scaling-effective-giving-through-everyday
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Note: I am the web programme director at 80,000 Hours and the view expressed here currently helps shape the web team's strategy. However, this shouldn't be taken to be expressing something on behalf of 80k as a whole, and writing and posting this memo was not undertaken as an 80k project.
80,000 Hours, where I work, has made helping people make AI go well [1]its focus. As part of this work, I think my team should continue to:
- Talk about / teach ideas and thinking styles that have historically been central to effective altruism (e.g. via our career guide, cause analysis content, and podcasts)
- Encourage people to get involved in the EA community explicitly and via linking to content.
I wrote this memo for the MCF (Meta Coordination Forum), because I wasn't sure this was intuitive to others. I think talking about EA ideas and encouraging people to get [...]
Outline:
(01:21) 1. The effort to make AGI go well needs people who are flexible and equipped to to make their own good decisions
(02:10) Counterargument: Agendas are starting to take shape, so this is less true than it used to be.
(02:43) 2. Making AGI go well calls for a movement that thinks in explicitly moral terms
(03:59) Counterargument: movements can be morally good without being explicitly moral, and being morally good is whats important.
(04:41) 3. EA is (A) at least somewhat able to equip people to flexibly make good decisions, (B) explicitly morally focused.
(04:52) (A) EA is at least somewhat able to equip people to flexibly make good decisions
(06:04) (B) EA is explicitly morally focused
(06:49) Counterargument: A different flexible & explicitly moral movement could be better for trying to make AGI go well.
(07:49) Appendix: What are the relevant alternatives?
(12:13) Appendix 2: anon notes from others
First published:
September 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oPue7R3outxZaTXzp/why-i-think-capacity-building-to-make-agi-go-well-should
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. “Bracketing Cluelessness” is a philosophy paper by Sylvester Kollin, Anthony DiGiovanni, Nicolas Macé, and myself, which presents a new approach to decision-making in the face of consequentialist cluelessness.
Abstract:
Consequentialists must take into account all possible consequences of their actions, including those in the far future. But due to the difficulty of getting a grasp on these consequences and producing non-arbitrary probabilities for them, it seems that consequentialists should often consider themselves clueless about which option is best. Contrary to orthodox consequentialism, however, there is a common-sense intuition that one should bracket those consequences which one is clueless about. Building on a model involving imprecise probability, we develop two novel alternatives to orthodoxy which capture this intuition. On bottom-up bracketing, we set aside those beneficiaries for whom we are clueless what would be best, and then base the overall verdict on the remainder. On top-down [...]
First published:
September 24th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RHhFo8WbiXsmzSiqk/linkpost-bracketing-cluelessness
Linkpost URL:
https://longtermrisk.org/files/Bracketing_Cluelessness.pdf
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Audio note: this article contains 126 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.
This is a less formal overview of the key ideas in the working paper “Bracketing Cluelessness”. There is also a standalone linkpost for the paper, which I’ve split off from this post, since this one contains personal commentary (not necessarily endorsed by my co-authors).
Summary* We may be clueless about how our actions affect aggregate welfare: we may not be able to say any intervention is better, worse, or exactly as good as another, in terms of its expected total consequences. There is an intuition that the appropriate response is to base our decisions on relatively robust and predictable effects, and that this favors near-term interventions like global health and animal welfare. But there is not yet [...]
Outline:
(00:41) Summary
(04:05) Introduction
(07:14) The basic idea
(11:49) In more detail: Formalism and major challenges
(11:55) Cluelessness and imprecise probabilities
(13:24) Defining bracketing
(21:45) Theoretical challenges
(21:49) What are the locations of value?
(23:52) Cyclicity
(24:48) Sequential decision-making
(25:35) Further implications of bracketing
(25:52) Getting off the train to crazy town: Why and where
(27:46) Bracketing beyond locations of value
(29:43) Conclusion
(30:46) Acknowledgements
(31:07) References
(31:13) Appendix: More on cyclicity
(31:18) Example of a cycle
(33:58) Versions of the objection from cyclicity and our responses
(34:04) The semantic argument
(35:14) The synchronic (one-off) choice argument
(36:36) The dynamic choice (value-pump) argument
First published:
September 24th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pecCRYaAzsfZkeAzi/bracketing-cluelessness-a-new-theory-of-altruistic-decision
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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The content of this report was written by me, Michael Dickens, and does not represent the views of Rethink Priorities. The executive summary was prepared by Rethink Priorities; I edited the final revision, so any mistakes are my own.
Executive Summary
Why AI Landscape Research and Incubating New Projects Matters
TAI may be a decade or less away, and misalignment could be catastrophic. We need repeated fast, rigorous scans of the field—what exists, what works, where funding and talent are concentrated, and where the next dollar or FTE most reduces risk. To that end, Rethink Priorities commissioned a rapid landscape analysis to surface neglected, high-leverage opportunities. The report, authored by Michael Dickens (views his own), reviews 34 areas of interest and identifies 77 organizations in the relevant fields.
Key Findings
1. Implementation-focused policy advocacy and communication are neglected
Both AI-safety technical research and [...]
Outline:
(00:26) Executive Summary
(00:29) Why AI Landscape Research and Incubating New Projects Matters
(01:09) Key Findings
(01:13) 1. Implementation-focused policy advocacy and communication are neglected
(02:56) 2. Non-technical, short-timelines work is undervalued
(04:02) 3. Work on AI for animal welfare is neglected & high-leverage
(05:18) Introduction
(08:30) Prelude
(09:58) Some positions Im going to take as given
(10:34) Definitions
(11:28) Prioritization
(12:31) Why not technical safety research?
(13:44) Why not AI policy research?
(15:25) Downsides of AI policy/advocacy (and why theyre not too big)
(21:35) What kinds of policies might reduce AI x-risk?
(23:41) Some AI policy ideas I like
(25:47) Maybe prioritizing post-TAI animal welfare
(27:08) Why not prioritize digital minds / S-risks / moral error / better futures / AI misuse x-risk / gradual disempowerment?
(30:44) Whos working on them?
(32:19) Some relevant research agendas
(33:48) General recommendations
(33:52) Advocacy should emphasize x-risk and misalignment risk
(36:56) Prioritize work that pays off if timelines are short
(38:06) Top project ideas
(38:24) Talk to policy-makers about AI x-risk
(42:35) Write AI x-risk legislation
(46:07) Advocate to change AI training to make LLMs more animal-friendly
(49:48) Develop new plans / evaluate existing plans to improve post-TAI animal welfare
(54:07) Honorable mentions
(54:10) Directly push for an international AI treaty
(56:06) Organize a voluntary commitment by AI scientists not to build advanced AI
(01:00:17) Peaceful protests
(01:04:08) Media about dangers of AI
(01:05:54) Message testing
(01:07:33) Host a website for discussion of AI safety and other important issues
(01:09:28) List of other project ideas
(01:10:09) AI-for-animals ideas
(01:10:14) Neartermist animal advocacy
(01:12:11) Using TAI to improve farm animal welfare
(01:14:45) Lobby governments to include animal welfare in AI regulations
(01:15:56) Traditional animal advocacy targeted at frontier AI developers
(01:17:14) Research which alignment strategies are more likely to be good for animals
(01:18:44) AI policy/advocacy ideas
(01:18:49) Improving US China relations / international peace
(01:20:31) Talk to international peace orgs about AI
(01:21:23) Increasing government expertise about AI
(01:24:32) Policy/advocacy in China
(01:26:29) Corporate campaigns to advocate for safety
(01:28:05) Develop AI safety/security/evaluation standards
(01:29:37) Slow down Chinese AI development via ordinary foreign policy
(01:32:07) Whistleblower protection/support
(01:33:26) Opinion polling
(01:34:32) Help AI company employees improve safety within their companies
(01:35:35) Direct talks with AI companies to make them safer
(01:36:58) Monitor AI companies on safety standards
(01:38:09) Create a petition or open letter on AI risk
(01:39:37) Create demonstrations of dangerous AI capabilities
(01:41:10) Sue OpenAI for violating its nonprofit mission
(01:42:50) Send people AI safety books
(01:44:15) AI research ideas
(01:44:34) Research on how to get people to extrapolate
(01:47:33) Investigate how to use AI to reduce other x-risks
(01:50:10) A short-timelines alignment plan that doesnt rely on bootstrapping
(01:52:15) Rigorous analysis of the various ways alignment bootstrapping could fail
(01:53:31) Future work
(01:53:35) Pros and cons of slowing down AI development, with numeric credences
(01:55:02) Quantitative model on AI x-risk vs. other x-risks
(01:56:21) Deeper investigation of the AI arms race situation
(01:56:53) Does slowing down/pausing AI help solve non-alignment problems?
(01:58:49) Determine when will be the right time to push for strong restrictions on AI (if not now)
(01:59:49) Supplements
The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 17th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CbHX5zL2uEvTasuiP/ai-safety-landscape-and-strategic-gaps
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Last week I asked a group of very online EAs if they’d heard of the Opportunities board. To my surprise, not one of them had.
So before sharing recent updates: The Opportunities board lists opportunities that require less time or expertise than a full-time role. It includes internships, volunteer opportunities, part-time roles, events, funding opportunities, training programs, and more. If you know someone who would benefit from the board, consider letting them know it exists!
View the board We’ve rolled out some UI updates
You can now access all filters without scrolling, and we’re making space to add more. You can also see more information about the opportunity up front: which type of opportunity it is, the exact time it got posted, and how many opportunities are currently on the board.
In the next few weeks we'll also add bigger pieces of functionality:
- Email alerts
- More filters (tell [...]
Outline:
(00:46) We've rolled out some UI updates
(01:31) Whats next for the board
(02:12) Ways you can help
First published:
September 24th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hJTniP4K2p2FaimgC/no-one-knows-what-the-opportunities-board-is-and-other
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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by Johnny Stengel – Political Advisor, Lobbyist, and Member of Effective Altruism Germany e.V.
Introduction
When people in the Effective Altruism community talk about “policy impact,” lobbying often comes up as one of the highest-leverage activities. But the practice of lobbying is rarely demystified. What does it actually look like? Who can do it effectively? How do you measure whether your hours in Brussels or Berlin truly shifted anything?
I want to share my experience — as someone who built a volunteer-based lobbying network from scratch, moved into federal and then EU-level policy engagement, and who now works across climate, AI, and governance issues. My aim here is not to glorify “influence” but to make the practice tangible, to outline what skills and strategies matter, and to highlight the systemic levers where lobbying may make the most difference for future generations.
How I Found Myself in Lobbying
In [...]
Outline:
(00:20) Introduction
(01:10) How I Found Myself in Lobbying
(02:54) What Lobbying really looks like
(04:35) Skills, Characters, and Misconceptions
(05:53) Collective Impact, Not Ego
(06:43) Windows of Opportunity
(07:31) Big Levers Beyond Traditional Lobbying
(08:22) Where the Biggest Impact Might Lie
(09:26) What Kind of People We Need
(09:59) Concluding Thoughts
First published:
September 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RvMTKY73J3c2aWD8T/effective-lobbyism-lessons-from-5-years-of-practice
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This memo was originally written for the Meta Coordination Forum 2025. I’m sharing this here (with some edits) in the hope it will be useful for others as well. (my other MCF memos are here: How High Impact Professionals (HIP) can support you; More Sharing of Top Candidates - Easy, High-Impact, Underused)
Disclaimer: I wrote this fairly quickly - no further research done compared to the data we have already available.
I’ve learned a lot from running programs for experienced professionals who are short on time but eager to make a bigger impact. Below are a few of the most transferable lessons - especially relevant if you're designing programs, courses, or communities in the high-impact space.
Drive action
Build actions gradually
We don’t ask participants to quit their job in Week 1. Instead:
- Start with lower-bar, outward-facing actions (e.g. adding their mission statement to their LinkedIn, reaching out [...]
Outline:
(01:00) Drive action
(01:03) Build actions gradually
(01:30) Celebrate actions and wins
(01:46) Offer people impactful steps inside their control
(02:12) Keeping your top performers engaged
(02:16) Maximise value per 15 minutes
(02:41) Select top participants
(03:04) Build a high-trust environment
(03:09) 1:1s in Week 1
(03:30) Mastermind sessions
(03:56) Design around your high-performers
(04:15) Make networking easy and low-effort
(04:19) Make it easy to find connections
(04:34) Include weekly 1:1 nudges
(04:50) Build in-person connections around conferences
First published:
September 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34MLDQN3f2LLkouvz/learnings-from-running-programs-for-busy-people-mcf-2025
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We've previously shared on the forum FarmKind's calculator to help meat-eaters offset the animal welfare impact of their diet through donations (like carbon offsets).
You can see our original post and the discussion about the calculator here.
One thing we've heard from early adopters is "this is great, and I think my [friend/family member] would be into this, but I'm not sure how to explain it to them". Understandable!
Explaining to people that even if they're not willing to change their diet, they can still help improve the lives of farmed animals through donations, without making them feel judged for their diet can be hard. Many people are quite defensive when it comes to their diet, and have come to associate calls for them to help farmed animals with judgmental vegans, even when they're not being judged at all.
To make it easier for people to share [...]
First published:
September 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Bc6E6AeWesmeobeKq/beyond-go-vegan-a-video-introducing-omnivores-to-another
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Intro and summary “How many chickens spared from cages is worth not being with my parents as they get older?!” - Me, exasperated (September 18, 2021)
This post is about something I haven’t seen discussed on the EA forum but I often talk about with my friends in their mid 30s. It's about something I wish I'd understood better ten years ago: if you are ~25 and debating whether to move to an EA Hub, you are probably underestimating how much the calculus will change when you’re ~35, largely related to having kids and aging parents. Since this is underappreciated, moving to an EA Hub, and building a life there, can lead to tougher decisions later that can sneak up on you.
If you’re living in an EA hub, or thinking about moving, this post explores reasons you might want to head home as you get older, different ways [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Intro and summary
(01:49) Why move to an EA Hub in the first place?
(02:57) How things change as you get older
(05:33) Why YOU might be more likely to feel the pull to head home
(06:49) How did I decide? How should you decide?
(08:38) Consolation prize - moving to a Hub isn't all or nothing
(09:38) Conclusion
First published:
September 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZEWE6K74dmzv7kXHP/moving-to-a-hub-getting-older-and-heading-home
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary: Consumers rejected genetically modified crops, and I expect they will do the same for cultivated meat. The meat lobby will fight to discredit the new technology, and as consumers are already primed to believe it's unnatural, it won’t be difficult to persuade them.
When I hear people talk about cultivated meat (i.e. lab-grown meat) and how it will replace traditional animal agriculture, I find it depressingly reminiscent of the techno-optimists of the 1980s and ‘90s speculating about how genetic modification will solve all our food problems. The optimism of the time was understandable: in 1994 the first GMO product was introduced to supermarkets, and the benefits of the technology promised incredible rewards. GMOs were predicted to bring about the end of world hunger, all while requiring less water, pesticides, and land.
Today, thirty years later, in the EU GM foods are so regulated that they are [...]
Outline:
(01:56) Why did GMOs fail to be widely adopted?
(02:44) A Bad First Impression
(05:54) Unpopular Corporate Concentration
(07:22) Cultivated Meat IS GMO
(08:45) What timeline are we in?
(10:24) What can be done to prevent cultivated meat from becoming irrelevant?
(10:30) Expect incredible opposition
(11:46) Be ready to tell a clear story about the benefits.
(13:17) A proactive PR Effort
(15:01) First impressions matter
(17:16) Labeling
(19:35) Be ready to discuss concerns about unnaturalness
(21:56) Limitations of the comparison
(23:07) Conclusion
First published:
September 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rMQA9w7ZM7ioZpaN6/cultivated-meat-a-wakeup-call-for-optimists
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This post provides a summary mapping of the EA / EA-adjacent career advising ecosystem as well as a list of various career resources, developed by the Career Advising Meta Forum.
What is the Career Advising Meta Forum?
EA and EA-adjacent organisations offer, in aggregate, dozens of incredible resources and thousands of career advising sessions per a year.
However, in early 2025, we realised that there existed seemingly few collaborations across the career advising sector. In late spring 2025, we began a working group of EA and EA adjacent organisations offering career advice and advising services to advance cooperation and collaboration in this space.
So far the forum has met three times to discuss challenges and opportunities in the impact-focused career advising space. We have a Slack group and met in-person at EAG London 2025 (as well as a smaller meeting a month before at EAGxNordics). We expect to meet [...]
Outline:
(00:22) What is the Career Advising Meta Forum?
(01:58) EA Career Advising Ecosystem Mapping
(02:03) How we made this list
(02:49) Organisations
(02:52) 80,000 Hours
(03:31) Probably Good
(04:21) Consultants for Impact
(05:06) Magnify Mentoring
(05:41) Animal Advocacy Careers
(06:24) Successif
(07:07) EA Germany
(07:38) High Impact Professionals
(08:17) EA Norway
(09:16) EA DC
(09:49) EA Sweden
(10:33) Christians for Impact / EA for Christians
(11:35) High Impact Medicine
(12:31) Effective Thesis
(13:13) EA France
(14:01) Effective Environmentalism
(14:44) EA Switzerland
(15:20) Other Career Advisories
(16:36) Job Boards
(20:02) Directories
(21:59) Courses / Fellowships
(25:02) Conferences
(26:16) Other resources people from EA career organisations recommend
First published:
September 19th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2j8HepKvT5bcCjBtE/ea-career-advising-ecosystem-mapping
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
My paper, "Price-, taste-, and convenience-competitive plant-based meat analogues would not currently replace the majority of meat consumption: A narrative review", first posted as a pre-print here on the EA Forum, is now published in the peer-reviewed journal Appetite.
The work has undergone many improvements since it was first posted, so it may be worthwhile taking another look now, although the overall conclusion hasn't changed. In particular:
- The new section "Studies of price and convenience manipulations individually" which reviews some recent literature on cross-price elasticities of plant-based meat, showing inconsistent results between studies: "Throughout, estimates sometimes suggested that decreased plant-based meat, butter and milk analogue prices might cause increased consumption of the corresponding animal product."
- Extended discussion in the section "Hypothetical discrete choice experiments," covering more details of the study designs.
- Better figures, now with error bars, and more citations throughout.
- A new [...]
First published:
September 18th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bn4Ez8TD6ina63r2v/now-peer-reviewed-price-taste-and-convenience-competitive
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary: this year the Survival and Flourishing Fund allocated $34.33 million to organizations working to secure humanity's future, with the vast majority going to AI (~$29MM), followed by biosecurity (~$2.5MM), and the rest going to various other causes as diverse as fertility, longevity, forecasting, memetics, math research, EA community building, and non-AI/bio global catastrophic risk (GCR) work.
Context
The Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) is a philanthropic organization that funds projects and organizations working to reduce global catastrophic risks, strengthen humanity's long-term resilience, and promote flourishing, often through regranting and expert panels to allocate resources efficiently.
This year I took a particularly in depth look at where SFF allocated its funds and broke down the results down by cause area. I figured I would share here the results through a brief post as I think it can be of general interest to others working on organizations that the [...]
First published:
September 17th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vhw6R5P52qJr6opou/sff-2025-funding-by-cause-area-usd34-million-to-ai-86-bio-7
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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In Fall 2023, EA Purdue barely existed. In fall 2024, EA Purdue had 35 people attend its intro meeting. In Fall 2025, EA Purdue had 33 new members attend its intro meeting despite doing dramatically more outreach.
Below, outreach method and scale is specified. It is followed by a discussion of the implications for university group organizers, community builders, and a request for help. If you’re not an organizer, feel free to skip to the “Why I think this happened” section of this post, as it should be more relevant.
Outreach MethodScale in 2024Scale in 2025 Club Fairs: Purdue has an all-club tabling fair and a computer science tabling fair. EA Purdue attended both of these in both years. These fairs yielded 100 and 32 mailing list signups respectively in fall 25. In fall 24, the fairs yielded 64 and 16 signups.
Side note: At Purdue, the freshmen tabling [...]
Outline:
(01:06) Background on Purdue
(02:08) Why I think this happened
(03:27) Implications
(04:14) Request to you
First published:
September 16th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AJTYcJw3uyYLux6nc/an-order-of-magnitude-increase-in-outreach-resulted-in-a
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TL;DR: After our spring pilot with 4 local communities, 35 participants, and valuable learnings, we're launching an improved version of Scaling Altruism for Fall 2025. We're seeking representatives of local communities who want to run introductory courses with reduced operational burden through centralized coordination.
What is Scaling Altruism? Scaling Altruism helps local effective altruism communities organize high-quality introductory courses while dramatically reducing operational costs through centralized coordination. Instead of each group reinventing the wheel, we handle the complex logistics so local contacts can focus on what they do best: community building and outreach.
What to expect? We (course coordinators) will take on most of the tasks of organizing a course, so you (local contacts) can focus on other aspects of community building.
You won't have to worry about managing applications, scheduling groups, and creating the online infrastructure for the program. We take care of coordinating and supporting mentors and [...]
Outline:
(00:37) What is Scaling Altruism?
(01:01) What to expect?
(02:16) Ideal Partner Groups
(02:58) Timeline and Next Steps
(03:26) Spring 2025 Pilot Results
(03:42) Key Metrics
(04:20) Key Learnings and Improvements for 2.0
(04:52) Interested in becoming a local contact?
First published:
September 15th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qtFcf47HsFRrnnQ8H/scaling-altruism-2-0-seeking-local-contacts-for-2025-fall
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. This is a linkpost for Positive Wild Animal Welfare by Heather Browning and Walter Veit, which was originally published on Biology & Philosophy on 12 March 2023. The abstract and last paragraph of the introduction are below. I am still guessing soil animals have negative lives, but I have been very uncertain.
Abstract
With increasing attention given to wild animal welfare and ethics, it has become common to depict animals in the wild as existing in a state dominated by suffering. This assumption is now taken on board by many and frames much of the current discussion; but needs a more critical assessment, both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we challenge the primary lines of evidence employed in support of wild animal suffering, to provide an alternative picture in which wild animals may often have lives that are far more positive than is commonly [...]
Outline:
(00:32) Abstract
(01:37) Introduction
First published:
September 16th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ey5YyNjMEfHT3Jmyq/positive-wild-animal-welfare
Linkpost URL:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-023-09901-5
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I listened to "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" today.
I think the first two parts of the book are the best available explanation of the basic case for AI misalignment risk for a general audience. I thought the last part was pretty bad, and probably recommend skipping it. Even though the authors fail to address counterarguments that I think are crucial, and as a result I am not persuaded of the book's thesis and think the book neglects to discuss crucial aspects of the situation and makes poor recommendations, I would happily recommend the book to a lay audience and I hope that more people read it.
I can't give an overall assessment of how well this book will achieve its goals. The point of the book is to be well-received by people who don't know much about AI, and I’m not very good at predicting how laypeople [...]
Outline:
(01:15) Synopsis
(05:21) My big disagreement
(10:53) I tentatively support this book
First published:
September 17th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/N5ecPMJRuH6gmxnJJ/i-enjoyed-most-of-iabed
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
My write-up as of September 2025 - feel free to ask me for a more updated Source of Truth if you're interested in this space
Key Players Making Video:
Organization
- Palisade Research:
- Does research on AI for policymakers and communicators.
- Has started its own video program - check out their videos! Run by Petr Lebedev, an ex-producer/scriptwriter for Veritasium
- Future of Life Institute (FLI): Has an accelerator program to fund creators making AI-related videos.
- AI Digest: Produces explainers on AI and as far as I know might be interested in someone running a video program for them
- Control AI is getting great clips from podcasts and putting them up on Twitter. I've suggested that they should create a spreadsheet of these so everyone can use them in their videos.
- "Fancier Crowd" that I’m going to be vague about: People with experience in Netflix pitches and successful political social [...]
Outline:
(00:20) Key Players Making Video:
(00:24) Organization
(02:13) Organizations that might be interested in doing more video
(02:20) Youtubers / Tiktokkers
(03:37) Filmmakers
(03:52) Lots of people are interested in working on this / helping out:
(04:41) Links where you can find more information
First published:
September 15th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h2WB4gnLCb8qekk5r/what-s-going-on-in-video-in-ai-safety-these-days-a-list
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A few days ago, Austin Chen and Marcus Abramovitch published How cost-effective are AI safety YouTubers?, an "Early work on ”GiveWell for AI Safety”, ranking different interventions in the AI Safety Video space, using a framework that measured impact by basically multiplying watchtime by three quality factors (Quality of Audience, Fidelity of Message and Alignment of Message).
Quality-adjusted viewer minute = Views × Video length × Watch % × Qa × Qf × Qm
The goal of this post is to explain to what extent I think this framework is useful, things I think it got wrong, and provide some additional criteria that I would personally want to see in a more comprehensive "AI Safety Givewell for video work".
tl;dr:
- I think Austin's and Marcus' framework has a lot of good elements, especially the three factors Quality, Fidelity and Alignment of message.
- Viewer Minutes is the wrong proxy [...]
Outline:
(00:58) tl;dr:
(01:45) What The Framework Gets Right
(02:50) Limitation: Viewer Minutes
(04:55) Siliconversations And The Art of Call to Action
(07:51) Moving Talent Through The Video Pipeline
(09:46) Categorizing The Video Pipeline
(12:18) Original Video Content
(14:21) Conclusion
First published:
September 15th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/d9kEfvKq3uqwjeRFJ/what-i-think-an-ai-safety-givewell-for-video-work-should
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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And the need for more AIS advocacy workExecutive Summary The Center for AI Policy (CAIP) is no more. CAIP was an advocacy organization that worked to raise policymakers’ awareness of the catastrophic risks from AI and to promote ambitious legislative solutions. Such advocacy is necessary because good governance ideas don’t spread on their own, and to meaningfully reduce AI risk, they must reach the U.S. federal government.
Why did CAIP shut down? The reasons are mixed. Some were internal, such as hiring missteps. But others reflect the broader ecosystem: funders setting the bar for advocacy projects at an unreasonably high level, structural biases in the funding space that privilege research over advocacy. While CAIP's mistakes played a role, a full account also needs to reckon with these systemic factors.
I focus on CAIP, as I think it filled a particular niche and was impactful, but there are many [...]
Outline:
(00:11) And the need for more AIS advocacy work
(00:15) Executive Summary
(02:25) Why Advocacy?
(07:27) What was CAIP up to?
(09:57) Was the Work Impactful?
(13:26) Why did CAIP Shut Down?
(13:58) CAIP's Failures
(15:38) Funders Have Set the Bar Too High for Advocacy
(18:17) Biases in the Funding Space
(20:30) What can we do?
(21:14) Donate Yourself
(24:01) Start an Organization
(26:33) In Conclusion
(27:03) Appendix
(27:07) A1: What is Advocacy?
(28:25) A2: Responses to General Opposition to Advocacy
(30:09) A3: AIS Grantmakers' Positions on AIS Advocacy
(31:42) A4: The Estimate of Funds Spent on AIS Advocacy
(33:00) A5: Donation Options in the AIS Advocacy Space
First published:
September 16th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/p5vrSuLdLLCCZGzvg/the-center-for-ai-policy-has-shut-down
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We scraped all EA forum posts & comments from 2024 and 2025 to use as a test bed for sense making, analysis, and AI-powered epistemic grading as a part of the Future of Life Foundation's Fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning.
(We’re happy to share all code and all datasets, etc. to interested parties. Just reach out!)
(There are streamlet dashboards associated with each image so you can search/sort with the data yourself)
General Sense Making Matt Brooks - matthewrbrooks94@gmail.com
I didn’t have a clear vision of what I was trying to find / accomplish, so I kind of did a bunch of random stuff to see what I found interesting and potentially valuable. Feel free to skip any sub section below that doesn’t seem interesting to you.
Here are the six types of analysis I explored:
- Had Gemini read 1M tokens of EA content and generate an [...]
Outline:
(00:46) General Sense Making
(01:51) EA Forum Egregore
(04:23) Monthly Vibe
(09:04) Page Rank & Author Analysis
(10:19) Topic Clusters
(10:54) Keyword Trend Analysis
(11:42) EA Forum Twins
(14:19) Post-Level Epistemic Quality Analysis
(22:40) Putting it into practice - Introducing Winnow
(23:36) Appendix
(23:39) An Analysis of the EA Forum Egregore
(33:13) All Monthly Summaries
First published:
September 15th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7kHX4CEiKJgWfJahY/we-mapped-the-ea-forum-s-intellectual-landscape-read-about
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. We’ve released our review of our programmes for the years 2023 to mid-2025. The full review is available on our website, and we’re sharing the summary below.
You can find our previous reviews here.
Summary: Key updates since 2022
- Niel Bowerman is our new CEO: He was appointed in January 2024 after a prolonged period of interim arrangements following the FTX collapse.
- We’re focusing harder on AGI as our top cause area: We narrowed our primary focus to helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with AGI.
- We’ve set up several new programmes and initiatives: We restarted our headhunting programme (now called 'sourcing'), launched a new video programme, released the second version of our career guide, and started releasing video interviews on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
- We’ve spun out from EV: On April 1, 2025, we spun out from EV [...]
First published:
September 15th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5LhZerWRjZHHFc8Cw/linkpost-80-000-hours-review-2023-to-mid-2025
Linkpost URL:
https://80000hours.org/2025/09/80000-hours-review-2023-to-mid-2025/
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. The Incident
It was 11 PM on a rainy August evening when my partner and I were walking back from a coffee shop in London, and I accidentally stepped on a snail. Its shell shattered completely under my weight, although it was still moving. We thought there was hope for it, and so we gently lifted it with a leaf and moved it off the sidewalk while I frantically searched on my phone for what to do.
What followed was five agonising minutes of research and moral deliberation before we made the decision to euthanise it by crushing it. Nearly every source we found said the same thing: with a completely shattered shell, a snail is extremely unlikely to survive. They are unlikely to be able to regenerate shells that are badly damaged, and without protection for their internal organs, they are exposed to infections [...]
Outline:
(00:13) The Incident
(03:36) What beyond that single snail?
(08:16) Do snails suffer?
(11:12) Why should we take this (and more) seriously?
(16:49) What can we actually do?
(19:24) Final thoughts
First published:
September 14th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/apKpiCCjkoriaWDmD/the-night-i-accidentally-stepped-on-a-snail
Linkpost URL:
https://riaviswanathan.substack.com/p/the-night-i-accidentally-stepped
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Introduction
The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in our everyday lives is rapidly accelerating. Take ChatGPT: released less than three years ago, it now has over a billion weekly users, and is already vastly more capable than the original version. The same goes for other popular AI models, like Google's Gemini or Anthropic's Claude. And that's just the tools that most of us have access to: behind the scenes, companies are increasingly using even more powerful AI for applications as diverse as financial trading, policing, and drug discovery.
Animal agriculture is no exception: major producers are already exploring how to integrate AI into their farms. In a couple of decades, the typical farmed pig might be overseen by an AI-powered CCTV system rather than a human farmer; China's pilot ‘pork skyscrapers’ give a taste of what this might look like. This could bring benefits: for example, commercially available systems [...]
Outline:
(00:13) Introduction
(02:30) Thomas Richie Manandhar-Richardson, Bryant Research
(02:53) Deep Research tools
(03:47) Rethinking research work
(05:05) Constant experimentation
(06:21) Aaron Boddy, Shrimp Welfare Project
(06:35) Creating an AI culture
(07:29) Precision Welfare
(08:43) The beginning of a revolution
(09:30) Hannah McKay, Rethink Priorities
(09:47) AI's impacts on animals is a huge research topic in itself
(10:43) AI-resilient interventions
(11:13) Skill-building for an AI-driven future
(12:23) Janire Castellano Bueno, Wild Animal Initiative
(12:39) AI for wild animals
(13:56) AI as an enhancement, not a replacement
(15:00) Accelerating writing tasks
(15:44) Sagar Shah, Rethink Priorities
(15:55) Accelerating research
(17:12) How to stay relevant in an AI world
(18:39) Don't fall behind
(19:03) Conclusion
First published:
September 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7yzupQyiS7arFzvZR/the-impacts-of-ai-on-animal-advocacy
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Link to the job posting.
I would strongly encourage community members with any type of science or tech background to apply for this role, particularly if they are readers of the paper and are able to emulate its style.
I was an Editorial Fellow at The Economist in 2021. This is kind of like being an old intern, but it did give me some useful insights that I think should make you think hard about applying for this role.
- The Economist is an enormously influential publication. With approximately 5 million readers per week, it is distinguished by the quality of its readership, which is (a) elite and (b) global. That is to say, it is read by English-speaking decisionmakers in government and the private sector beyond just the English-speaking world.
- Many journalists at the paper do not have prior journalism experience; domain expertise, writing ability, and the ability [...]
First published:
September 14th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4Znw4GXNdedJquW83/the-economist-is-hiring-a-science-and-technology
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Various people are worried about AI causing extreme power concentration of some form, for example via:
- Powergrabs
- The intelligence curse
- Gradual disempowerment
I have been talking to some of these people and trying to sense-make about ‘power concentration’.
These are some notes on that, mostly prompted by some comment exchanges with Nora Ammann (in the below I’m riffing on her ideas but not representing her views). Sharing because I found some of the below helpful for thinking with, and maybe others will too.
(I haven’t tried to give lots of context, so it probably makes most sense to people who’ve already thought about this. More the flavour of in progress research notes than ‘here's a crisp insight everyone should have’.)
AI risk as power concentration Sometimes when people talk about power concentration it sounds to me like they are talking about most of AI risk, including AI takeover [...]
Outline:
(00:55) AI risk as power concentration
(03:58) Power concentration as the undermining of checks and balances
First published:
September 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnkEoTxdGCsBFRQty/sense-making-about-extreme-power-concentration
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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A handful of us from EA Salt Lake City are dipping our toes into program evaluation, looking at the impact of an organization run by one of our members. This post highlights the progress we’ve made so far, as well as a number of questions that we’re hoping EA folks with a bit more experience can help us answer.
TLDR: We’ve found that digging wells in Niger easily clears Open Philanthropy's “Bar”, and we are looking for feedback to see if our analysis makes sense.
The Organization: Wells4Wellness
Wells4Wellness has been operating since 2009, digging (and importantly, maintaining) wells across Niger. Niger has one of the highest rates of death from unsafe water sources in the world at around 80 deaths per 100,000 people per year. Most of those deaths are children under 5 dying from diarrhea. A majority of the country is also sitting on top [...]
Outline:
(00:39) The Organization: Wells4Wellness
(02:04) Our Current DALY Estimates
(05:21) Costs and ROI
(07:51) Comparison to Chlorination
(09:55) Time Horizon and Discounting
(10:41) Our Questions
First published:
September 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Q36besmzrHfNPadSA/well-well-well-do-wells-clear-the-bar
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Written by Lucas Moore (Partnerships Manager) and Sjir Hoeijmakers (CEO), Giving What We Can.
This memo provides updates on and a high-level overview of the effective giving landscape as of mid-2025, adapted from an earlier memo for Effective Giving Summit in June 2025. It is based largely on information gathered through our 2025 EG ecosystem pulse survey and builds on the memos we wrote for the MCF last year: 1, 2, 3, 4. Please leave a comment if you’d like us to clarify anything further. All figures are in USD.
Background
The effective giving ecosystem features an interdependent network of over 60 organisations trying to direct philanthropic resources to where they can do the most good, inspired by effective altruism principles and concepts such as cost-effectiveness, cause prioritisation and counterfactuality.
Within this ecosystem, there are organisations identifying high-impact philanthropic opportunities (evaluators) and organisations fundraising for them (fundraisers). Many [...]
Outline:
(01:24) Key updates
(07:35) Overview of the ecosystem
(09:33) How much money is moved to high-impact destinations
(11:59) Where money goes
(13:54) Where operational funding comes from
First published:
September 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dm2uawLLeLbY8WNKM/updates-on-the-effective-giving-ecosystem-mcf-2025-memo
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This report is the second in a sequence detailing the results of Wave 2 of the Pulse project by Rethink Priorities (RP). Pulse is a large-scale survey of US adults aimed at tracking and understanding public attitudes towards effective giving and multiple impactful cause areas over time. Wave 2 of Pulse was fielded between February and April of 2025 with ~5600 respondents.[1] Results from our first wave of Pulse, fielded from July-September of 2024, can be found here, with the forum sequence version here.
This part of the Wave 2 sequence focuses on attitudes towards AI.
Findings at a glance
Survey features:
- Wave 2 of Rethink Priorities’ Pulse project surveyed ~5,600 US adults between February and April 2025, following up on Wave 1 (July–September 2024).
- Results were poststratified to be representative of the US adult population with respect to Age, Sex, Income, Racial identification, Educational attainment, State and [...]
Outline:
(00:52) Findings at a glance
(03:40) Worry about AI
(07:50) How the US public views different stances on AI
First published:
September 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xAoAB2bopZP2FWomt/us-public-attitudes-towards-artificial-intelligence-wave-2
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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It's been several years since I was an EA student group organiser, so please forgive any part of this post which feels out of touch (& correct me in comments!)
Wow, student group organising is hard.
A few structural things that make it hard to be an organiser:
- You maybe haven’t had a job before, or have only had kind of informal jobs. So, you might not have learned a lot of stuff about how to accomplish things at work.
- You’re probably trying to do a degree at the same time, which is hard enough on its own!
- You don’t have the structure and benefits provided by a regular 9-5 job at an organisation, like:
- A manager
- An office
- Operational support
- People you can ask for help & advice
- A network
- You have, at most, a year or so to skill up before you might be responsible [...]
First published:
September 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zMBFSesYeyfDp6Fj4/student-group-organising-is-hard-and-important
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Hi EAs!
We posted earlier about Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC) proving in court that SPCAs can sue to stop agricultural cruelty. LIC had survived a demurrer in our lawsuit against well-known dairy Alexandre Family Farm. In a victory for farmed animals, the Humboldt County Superior Court had acknowledged LIC's power, as a California society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (SPCA), to prevent animal cruelty through civil litigation.
Since then, Alexandre petitioned the California Court of Appeal for a writ of mandate against the Humboldt County Superior Court itself. Alexandre asked the appellate court to intervene in the LIC v. Alexandre lawsuit by ordering the Superior Court to change its mind and dismiss the case after all. This appeared to be an attempt to avoid litigation on the question of whether Alexandre is, in fact, committing illegal animal cruelty.
So LIC retained a powerful team of [...]
First published:
September 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gvGnMQdJHoGdamsow/spca-cruelty-enforcement-case-clears-another-hurdle
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Early work on ”GiveWell for AI Safety”
Intro
EA was founded on the principle of cost-effectiveness. We should fund projects that do more with less, and more generally, spend resources as efficiently as possible. And yet, while much interest, funding, and resources in EA have shifted towards AI safety, it's rare to see any cost-effectiveness calculations. The focus on AI safety is based on vague philosophical arguments that the future could be very large and valuable, and thus whatever is done towards this end is worth orders of magnitude more than most short-term effects.
Even if AI safety is the most important problem, you should still strive to optimize how resources are spent to achieve maximum impact, since there are limited resources.
Global health organizations and animal welfare organizations work hard to measure cost-effectiveness, evaluate charities, make sure effects are counterfactual, run RCTs, estimate moral weights, scope out interventions [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Early work on GiveWell for AI Safety
(00:16) Intro
(02:43) Step 1: Gathering data
(03:00) Viewer minutes
(03:35) Costs and revenue
(04:49) Results
(05:08) Step 2: Quality-adjusting
(05:40) Quality of Audience (Qa)
(06:58) Fidelity of Message (Qf)
(08:05) Alignment of Message (Qm)
(08:53) Results
(09:37) Observations
(12:37) How to help
(13:36) Appendix: Examples of Data Collection
(13:42) Rob Miles
(14:18) AI Species (Drew Spartz)
(14:56) Rational Animations
(15:32) AI in Context
(15:52) Cognitive Revolution
First published:
September 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SBsGCwkoAemPawfJz/how-cost-effective-are-ai-safety-youtubers
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Lately I’ve been trying to raise awareness of AI risks among American conservatives. Stopping the reckless development of advanced AI agents (including Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)) should be a human issue, not a partisan issue. Yet most people working in AI safety advocacy lean to the Left politically, and we seem to be ignoring many potential allies on the Right.
This neglect of conservative allies seems suboptimal, given that the Republican Party currently controls all three branches of the U.S. government (including the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and majorities in the House and the Senate). Granted, the pro-AI lobbyists, Big Tech accelerationists, and tech VCs like Andreessen Horowitz have some influence with the current White House (e.g. on AI Czar David Sacks), but many conservative political leaders in the executive and legislative branches have expressed serious public concerns about AI risks.
In the [...]
First published:
September 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g44SMGzwKGTYhqSXM/my-talk-on-ai-risks-at-the-national-conservatism-conference
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A special edition of our flagship CE program, focused on increasing effectiveness in the philanthropic sector.
TL;DR: Each year, AIM incubates new nonprofits in global health and farmed animal welfare. In 2026, we’ll also run a special edition round dedicated to launching ~3–5 new philanthropic organizations. Applications for all three 2026 cohorts are open until October 5th.
What
We’re thrilled to announce that in 2026, AIM's Charity Entrepreneurship Program will expand to three rounds per year. Two of these rounds will continue our proven focus on farmed animals and global health. The third will expand on opportunities we’ve identified to shape the philanthropic sector by launching a set of new, impactful organizations.
The organizations may focus on activities such as:
- Providing specialist advisory services to large donors
- Training grantmakers
- Running high-quality, outcome-focused events for philanthropists
- Launching targeted, theme-driven funds
- Producing edu-tainment around grantmaking
In the past [...]
Outline:
(00:42) What
(01:59) Why
(02:45) Who
(03:15) Structure of the program
(03:46) One application for three cohorts
(04:52) Excited?
(05:19) Questions?
First published:
September 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wRNtqKHbsEjZPXE5j/want-to-start-a-philanthropic-organization-announcing-aim-s
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
or Maximizing Good Within Your Personal Constraints
Note: The specific numbers and examples below are approximations meant to illustrate the framework. Your actual calculations will vary based on your situation, values, and cause area. The goal isn't precision—it's to start thinking explicitly about impact per unit of sacrifice rather than assuming certain actions are inherently virtuous.
You're at an EA meetup. Two people are discussing their impact:
Alice: "I went vegan, buy only secondhand, bike everywhere, and donate 5% of my nonprofit salary to animal charities."
Bob: "I work in finance, eat whatever, and donate 40% of my income to animal charities."
Who gets more social approval? Alice. Who prevents more animal suffering? Bob—by orders of magnitude.
Alice's choices improve welfare for hundreds of animal-years annually through diet change and her $2,500 donation. Bob's $80,000 donation improves tens of thousands of animal-years through corporate campaigns. Yet Alice is [...]
Outline:
(00:11) or Maximizing Good Within Your Personal Constraints
(01:31) The Personal Constraint Framework
(02:26) Return on Sacrifice (RoS): The Core Metric
(03:05) Case Studies: Where Good Intentions Go Wrong
(03:10) Career: The Counterfactual Question
(04:32) Environmental Action: Personal vs. Systemic
(05:13) Information and Influence
(05:45) Truth vs. Reach
(06:17) The Uncomfortable Truth About Offsets
(07:43) When Personal Practice Actually Matters
(08:22) Your Personal Impact Portfolio
(09:38) The Reallocation Exercise
(10:40) Addressing the Predictable Objections
(11:41) The Call to Action
(12:10) The Bottom Line
First published:
September 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/u9WzAcyZkBhgWAew5/your-sacrifice-portfolio-is-probably-terrible
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Introduction
Giving What We Can (GWWC) has partnered with a variety of organisations, both within and outside of the EA ecosystem, to promote the 🔸10% Pledge and 🔹Trial Pledge in ways tailored to their audiences. These partnerships provide new avenues for people to learn about and take giving pledges, helping to direct more funds toward highly impactful opportunities.
If you’re interested in exploring a partnership with GWWC, reach out to lucas.moore@givingwhatwecan.org (GWWC's Partnerships Manager).
Coming out of the Effective Giving Summit in June (where Nina Friedrich from HIP led a session on promoting giving pledges) we wanted to share some of our key takeaways, as well as learnings from partners that have successfully driven a high volume of pledges. Our hope is that others can adapt and build on these strategies in their own work.
1. Meeting 1-1 with your community (example: Mieux Donner)
Mieux Donner is a fundraising [...]
Outline:
(00:12) Introduction
(01:05) 1. Meeting 1-1 with your community (example: Mieux Donner)
(02:02) When cold reaching out, personalise your ask
(03:17) Leverage in-person events
(03:40) Prepare for the conversation (optional)
(03:49) 2. Cohort-based programs (example: High Impact Professionals)
(03:57) Overview of our pledge drive
(05:09) Strategies we use to inspire pledges
(06:27) How we build trust and motivation to pledge among our participants
(07:29) You can apply these learnings in different organisations/settings
(08:38) Key lessons
(09:54) 3. Digital ad campaigns (example: Animal Advocacy Careers)
(10:56) Meta ads
(12:20) 4. Passive pledge generation (example: Effektiv Spenden)
(14:07) Interested in a Pledge Partnership?
(15:33) What our partners say
First published:
September 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/39nagbirZPkiWivvn/strategies-for-promoting-giving-pledges
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Note: This post was crossposted from the Lauren Policy blog by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Most of this blog is about international migration, and particularly, the economics of international migration. I write about income gains, but more in the sense of “here is the headline result of a working paper” rather than personal stories. This post is an exception to that.
I joined Malengo for their annual retreat[1] this year, and had a chance to speak to a number of young international migrants about their experience.
Malengo is an NGO facilitating international migration. It supports Ugandan and refugee students[2] in obtaining a German university degree and then working in Germany.
When a student moves to Germany, their life prospects improve markedly. A Ugandan university graduate will be lucky to earn $5,000 a year; a [...]
Outline:
(04:09) How It's Going
(05:36) Malengo Student Interviews
First published:
September 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zFbDpTb5xjTnntCpf/what-happens-when-you-send-ugandan
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In the town hall in Siena, there is a set of frescos by Lorenzetti called the Allegory of Good and Bad Government. It was painted between 1338 and 1339 on the walls of the Sala dei Nove, where Siena's magistrates held council.
One of the long walls shows the Effects of good government. The harvest is ready in the fields and vineyards beyond the city walls, a farmer drives his pig to town, the city is clean and elegant, and citizens are dancing in the streets to celebrate a wedding.
One of the dancers is wearing a dress embroidered with dragonflies.
When the councilman sat to make their decisions, that was what they were looking at and hoping for.
On the opposite wall is a fresco showing the Effects of bad government, but I think they get enough airtime as is, so I’m not going to go [...]
Outline:
(04:30) A post-AGI allegory
(10:46) Postscript: what we stand to lose
First published:
September 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JjicJYdxsJsyqMyYk/good-government
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Executive Summary I think EA community building is too focused on frameworks and optimising for impact when what actually works is much more basic: genuine relationships and starting where people already are, not just treating the community as instrumental for impact, but something valuable in and of itself.
Learn from groups that actually work. Every other society at freshers' fair is trying to build student communities too, and many of them do it better than us. We're not special just because we care about impact, and our focus on this probably makes us worse than the groups that solely focus on community.
Start with altruism, not EA concepts. Instead of "EA is a way of thinking about how to do the most good," try "Want to figure out how you can do more good for the world? Let's explore that together." People who genuinely care about helping others are [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Executive Summary
(02:13) Introduction
(03:02) On Learning from Others
(04:39) On Starting with Altruism, Not Frameworks
(06:15) On Building Genuine Community
(07:57) On Facilitation and Relationships
(08:28) On Strategy and Learning
(12:37) On Power Dynamics and Hierarchy
(14:01) On Programming Alternatives
(15:31) Key Takeaways for Community Builders
First published:
September 9th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/agFxcinYtBqjDgCNk/sam-s-hot-takes-on-ea-community-building
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post summarizes a new preprint from the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford titled “Taking a bite out of meat, or just giving fresh veggies the boot? Plant-based meats did not reduce meat purchasing in a randomized controlled menu intervention.”
The paper reports on an online RCT where participants were asked to select taco fillings from one of three menus designed to mimic the options at Chipotle. They could choose from both meat- and plant-based options.
The randomized treatment was whether participants saw
- one plant-based option (veggie & guacamole)
- two (veggie + ‘Sofritas,’ an existing plant-based meat analogue (PMA) that you can get at Chipotle)
- or three (veggie + Sofritas + ‘Chick’nitas,’ a hypothetical chicken-analogue PMA).
The treatment was embedded in a series of decoy questions about choosing pens and t-shirts to obscure the purpose of the study.
The main outcome was whether people chose [...]
First published:
September 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sXQrBxHuBxyxdkMp3/research-report-adding-a-plant-based-option-or-two-does-not
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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There's a huge amount of energy spent on how to get the most QALYs/$. And a good amount of energy spent on how to increase total $. And you might think that across those efforts, we are succeeding in maximizing total QALYs.
I think a third avenue is under investigated: marginally improving the effectiveness of ineffective capital. That's to say, improving outcomes, only somewhat, for the pool of money that is not at all EA-aligned.
This cash is not being spent optimally, and likely never will be. But the sheer volume could make up for the lack of efficacy.
Say you have the option to work for the foundation of one of two donors:
- Donor A only has an annual giving budget of $100,000, but will do with that money whatever you suggest. If you say “bed nets” he says “how many”.
- Donor B has a much larger [...]
Outline:
(01:34) Most money is not EA money
(04:32) How much money is there?
(05:49) Effective Everything?
First published:
September 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o5LBbv9bfNjKxFeHm/marginally-more-effective-altruism
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I drafted this in May. I’m just getting this post out the door now, but the atmosphere feels similar.
I’m feeling unusually worried right now about problems in the world. I'm typically skeptical when people claim things are uniquely bad—and I counter their claim with some uplifting graph from Our World in Data. But recent developments around AI timelines, global political changes, and cuts to important global health programs, have left me more pessimistic than usual.
I'm reminded of physicist Richard Feynman writing about his time shortly after working on the Manhattan Project:
I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
This captures how I've been feeling lately—watching normal life continue while carrying this sense [...]
Outline:
(01:19) If youre feeling stressed or overwhelmed
(03:25) If youre with others who are stressed
(04:54) Review your career path, but dont constantly second-guess
(05:21) Choose your part of the probability distribution
(06:43) Getting support
First published:
September 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ezyh7LqNaigBvjhXw/when-the-world-feels-unstable-don-t-let-that-drive-worse
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Reflections from an Incubation Program in Latin America
This is the second in a series of posts about a nonprofit incubation program we’re running in Spanish-speaking Latin America, funded by Open Philanthropy. The goal is to support the creation of new, evidence-based organizations that implement cost-effective interventions adapted to local contexts. You can find the first post here.
We have finished selecting the first cohort of founders. In this post we will introduce the framework used to select them, along with some learnings that can be useful for other people founding or considering founding an effective nonprofit or joining an incubation program.
But first, a quick update: we have decided to rebrand our program name, as the previous one had an important similarity to another impact-focused incubator, Catalyze Impact. Our new program name is: Theory of Change Makers.
TL;DR
We launched the Theory of Change Makers program [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Reflections from an Incubation Program in Latin America
(01:15) TL;DR
(04:27) Complete post:
(04:31) Summary data
(06:18) Logistics of the selection process
(08:46) Main learnings in the selection process
(10:14) Things we saw a lot in the application process and why an EA lens is highly beneficial from an incubation perspective
(13:54) What was non-negotiable?
(15:27) Some things that aren't as obvious as they might seem
(16:51) The hardest part of the selection process
(19:34) ✨ Personal Commitment Letter ✨
First published:
September 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9nzhoRCDvgatg4EED/who-should-found-high-impact-ngos-in-the-global-south
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This is a link post. ACX/Scott Alexander's summary:
But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible, and it's more or less cost-effective already for the simplest products! Again, mixed reactions, and although some of the numbers are indisputable the analysis itself this is by a VC firm with lab-based meat investments.
From the report:
Not long after Humbird's analysis was published, independent news outlet The Counter (now part of Grist) ran a long-form feature that echoed many of the report's key assumptions and conclusions. Together, the two pieces helped catalyze a wave of heightened skepticism, with their central arguments reiterated and amplified in mainstream outlets including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal.
...
While it may take years—or even decades—to fully understand how the cultured meat industry will [...]
First published:
September 4th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/88KaKw5QejmwrqqvP/room-for-optimism-on-cultured-meat
Linkpost URL:
https://www.proteinreport.org/articles/the-case-for-cultured-meat-has-changed/
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‘Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future’ was recently published by Oxford University Press. It's open access — you can read it for free here[1].
The book covers the case for longtermism, ways to forecast and evaluate the future, discussions of our priorities in light of longtermism, and the prospects for longtermism in institutions. David Thorstad goes into more detail on the book's contents here.
An academic book like this is published in the hope that it will generate more serious discussion of the ideas it contains and the questions it raises. To contribute to that goal, we’re working with the book's editors to host an essay competition here on the Forum.
To enter: write an essay (of whatever length it needs to be[2]) in response to an essay (or a theme from across the essays) in this collection. Then, post it on the [...]
Outline:
(01:09) Prizes:
(01:21) The Judges
(03:09) How we will select the winners
(04:20) The prize is money, so... legal stuff
(04:57) FAQs
(05:00) Am I eligible?
(05:21) Can I co-author a piece?
(05:31) Can I treat entries to the competition like regular forum posts?
(05:49) Can I submit a piece I've already published elsewhere?
(06:19) Are there prizes for referring pieces?
(06:26) Will I get feedback on my entry?
(06:44) What criteria will submissions be judged on?
(07:27) Does style matter?
(07:46) (How) Can I use AI?
(08:15) Can I enter more than once?
First published:
September 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pFd3F84iMauLjsN4A/announcing-the-essays-on-longtermism-competition
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Introduction
We are pleased to announce the publication of Essays on Longtermism, now available from Oxford University Press. This is the first peer-reviewed edited volume on longtermism, containing an introduction and 30 substantive chapters, which are all available open access here. (Please bear with us as we work through a few issues with the ebook).
The book is edited by Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford), Jacob Barrett (Vanderbilt University), and David Thorstad (Vanderbilt University).
Here is the blurb for the volume:
Longtermism, broadly speaking, is the view that positively influencing the long-term future is one of the key moral priorities of our time. Calls for taking a long-term view towards global problems such as climate change and poverty are familiar, typically urging us to plan on a scale of decades or perhaps a century. By contrast, longtermism asks us to take seriously the idea that what we should do [...]
Outline:
(00:09) Introduction
(02:18) Part 1: Evaluating the case for longtermism
(04:00) Part 2: Predicting and evaluating the future
(05:03) Part 3: Ethical priorities
(07:32) Part 4: Institutions and society
First published:
September 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GYYWJr9vMetar2D64/essays-on-longtermism
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Why 10%?
Because that's the number of the 10% Pledge. No other reason.
How big a deal is donating 10% of your pre-tax income really?
On the one hand, 10% of one's income feels like a lot of money no matter how much you make. But on the other hand, incomes vary tremendously such that no matter how much you make, giving away 10% of your income won't change your relative income rank by much.
If you're an American who income is higher than 20% / X% / 80% of Americans, then your effective income leftover after donating 10% of your pre-tax income will still be higher than 18% / X-7% / 76% of Americans.
In the US, donating 10% at most lowers your income percentile by 6.3 percentile from 54th percentile to 47.7th percentile, requiring you to live on $49,500 instead of $55,000.
So from this perspective at [...]
Outline:
(00:23) Why 10%?
(00:32) How big a deal is donating 10% of your pre-tax income really?
(01:36) An old related memory
(04:00) Better versions of this chart
First published:
September 7th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vRqWoxfBHjuxJEkoi/how-big-a-deal-is-donating-10-of-your-income-really-a
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Hi, have you been rejected from all the 80K listed EA jobs you’ve applied for? It sucks, right? Welcome to the club. What might be comforting is that you (and I) are not alone. EA Job listings are extremely competitive, and in the classic EA career path, you just get rejected over and over. Many others have written about their rejection experience, here, here, and here.
Even if it is quite normal for very smart, hardworking, proactive, and highly motivated EAs to get rejected from high-impact positions, it still sucks.
It sucks because we sincerely want to make the world a radically better place. We’ve read everything, planned accordingly, gone through fellowships, rejected other options, and worked very hard just to get the following message:
"Thank you for your interest in [Insert EA Org Name]... we have decided to move forward with other candidates for this role... we're unfortunately [...]
Outline:
(06:13) A note on AI timelines
(08:51) Time to go forward
First published:
September 5th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pzbtpZvL2bYfssdkr/rejected-from-all-the-ea-jobs-you-applied-for-what-to-do-now
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Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
How I decided what to say — and what not to
I’m excited to share my TED talk. Here I want to share the story of how the talk came to be, and the three biggest decisions I struggled with in drafting it.
The backstory
Last fall, I posted on X about Trump's new Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, vowing to undo state bans on the sale of pork from crated pigs. I included an image of a pig in a crate.
Liv Boeree, a poker champion and past TED speaker, saw that post and was haunted by it. She told me that she couldn’t get the image of the crated pig out of her [...]
First published:
September 5th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XjQr52eDkBPLrLHB3/my-ted-talk
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Some quick but important disclaimers:
- I'm definitely not an expert in the topics discussed, and the thoughts I've put together here are not particularly rigorous. This is really just a call for broader discussion of this topic, and a request for people to consider acting on or evaluating the "Next Steps" below.
- This article was largely written with animal welfare considerations in mind. Though you could substitute in different cause areas, this obviously introduces different considerations (I think aid interventions or climate will be more partisan, for instance but others like AI Safety could more easily draw bipartisan support).
- This is my first EA Forum post. Any general feedback is appreciated!
1. Why the UK Might Be in a Politically Unusual Moment
A few global trends indicate that we're currently in a time of political volatility: incumbent leaders are being ousted more readily than before; the influence of [...]
Outline:
(00:56) 1. Why the UK Might Be in a Politically Unusual Moment
(03:25) 2. Why This Could Make Political Interventions More Tractable
(04:47) 3. Possible Next Steps
(06:30) 4. Risks and Objections
(07:46) Bottom line:
First published:
September 3rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qX3hRrnxsLGciQxQX/is-now-an-unusually-good-time-to-pursue-political
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Introduction Inspired by Paul Christiano's 2019 piece What failure looks like, we sketch a range of ways in which a future with powerful AI may go badly for animals.
We suggest:
- At some point in the future, AI is likely to become very powerful (e.g. AGI, TAI, ASI).
- This point may be soon (e.g. by 2030).
- Powerful AI is likely to have a huge impact on animals.
- We don’t know what this impact on animals will be, and it could be very bad or catastrophic.
Here are two philosophical assumptions we make for the purposes of this piece:
- The moral value and relevance of animals derives from their status as sentient individuals. Their membership of a group (like a species), their role in or impact on an ecosystem, or their aesthetic value in the eyes of humans fall outside the scope of this piece.
- Adopting a pluralistic [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Introduction
(02:12) Ways things go badly for animals
(08:33) Conclusion
First published:
September 3rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DHqDsSCCt7udcBYcw/what-failure-looks-like-for-animals
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a set of personal reflections from running EA in the Lakes, a lower-cost retreat in the northern UK. (we've also got some great photos of reflections in water sources, if that's more your thing.)
--
The organising team: I was the organising team. To be fair, my housemate (who works in mental health) was going to come along and do participant welfare / shuttle driving but then had to be at counselling supervision, and my backup event cook friend got a paid cooking job that weekend as well. The perils of volunteer organising! Never mind, I can organise, cook, welfare, first aid, and drive if I have to (don't plan to do this). I appointed a couple of helpers on free tickets from our EAs for content-based query handling and extra super-boring logistics work like bin emptying.
To anyone in EA thinking of solo organising, my advice [...]
First published:
September 3rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YzH8QzxYJDkR7Gm7X/ea-in-the-lakes-reflections
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This is a link post. Forecasting Research Institute just released a new report: Assessing Near-Term Accuracy in the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament
In June–October 2022, we convened 169 people to participate in the “Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament” (XPT). The XPT participants included both superforecasters with proven forecasting track records and domain experts with subject-matter expertise. The tournament incentivized accurate forecasting and persuasive argumentation about long-term risks humanity may face, including risks from artificial intelligence (AI), climate change, nuclear war, and pandemics. This report analyzes respondents’ forecasting accuracy on 38 near-term questions that resolved by mid-2025.
The study finds overall performance parity between superforecasters and domain experts, with both groups underestimating AI progress and overestimating improvements in climate technology. Both superforecasters and domain experts substantially outperformed a baseline of educated members of the general public.
Read the full report here: https://forecastingresearch.org/near-term-xpt-accuracy
First published:
September 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fp5kEpBkhWsGgWu2D/assessing-near-term-accuracy-in-the-existential-risk
Linkpost URL:
https://forecastingresearch.org/near-term-xpt-accuracy
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tl;dr - If timelines are short, it's too late, and if they are long (and if we don't all die,) the way to win the "AI race" is to generate more benefit from AI, not control of chip production.
In AI policy, there's a lot of focus on the speed frontier AI develops and becomes increasingly important for the economy, and creates substantial new risks of loss of control. There is also a lot of focus on the chips needed for training and running the frontier models, which involves industrial policy around who has the chips, and who can make them. This leads to a questionable narrative around the race for AGI, but even before we get to that question, there's a simple question about the dynamics of the two dimensions.
If AI takeoff is fast, the question of where the chips will be located is already determined [...]
First published:
August 31st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7GHbwiDqMLYr2g4S7/chip-production-policy-won-t-matter-as-much-as-you-d-think
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In 2021, a circle of researchers left OpenAI, after a bitter dispute with their executives. They started a competing company, Anthropic, stating that they wanted to put safety first. The safety community responded with broad support. Thought leaders recommended engineers to apply, and allied billionaires invested.[1]
Anthropic's focus has shifted – from internal-only research and cautious demos of model safety and capabilities, toward commercialising models for Amazon and the military.
Despite the shift, 80,000 Hours continues to recommend talented engineers to join Anthropic. On the LessWrong forum, many authors continue to support safety work at Anthropic, but I also see side-conversations where people raise concerns about premature model releases and policy overreaches. So, a bunch of seemingly conflicting opinions about work by different Anthropic staff, and no overview. But the bigger problem is that we are not evaluating Anthropic on its original justification for existence.
Did early researchers put [...]
Outline:
(04:47) 1. Scaled GPT before founding Anthropic
(19:02) Rationale #1: 'AI progress is inevitable'
(24:09) Rationale #2: 'we scale first so we can make it safe'
(30:01) Rationale #3: 'we reduce the hardware overhang now to prevent disruption later'
(32:39) 2. Founded an AGI development company and started competing on capabilities
(39:12) Early commitments
(41:09) Degrading commitments
(44:52) Declining safety governance
(46:27) 3. Lobbied for policies that minimised Anthropic's accountability for safety
(47:14) Minimal 'Responsible Scaling Policies'
(59:20) Lobbied against provisions in SB 1047
(01:02:25) 4. Built ties with AI weapons contractors and the US military
(01:03:50) Anthropics intel-defence partnership
(01:06:20) Anthropics earlier ties
(01:07:40) 5. Promoted band-aid fixes to speculative risks over existing dangers that are costly to address
(01:11:50) Cheap fixes for risks that are still speculative
(01:14:02) Example of an existing problem that is costly to address
(01:17:20) Conclusion
First published:
September 1st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/izGaTX3E7tdTa29a5/anthropic-s-leading-researchers-acted-as-moderate
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I and David Manheim, a Good Judgement's superforecaster, agreed on the following bet on 19 May 2025:
- If the mean monthly unemployment rate in the United States (US) in 2027, as reported by the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), is higher than 8 %, I donate 2 k$ to an organisation or fund of David's choice in January 2028.
- Otherwise, David donates 1 k$ to an organisation or fund of my choice in January 2028. Currently, it would be the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research's (CEARCH's) High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF), which I estimate decreases 5.07 billion soil-animal-years per $.
Neglecting the risk of the bet not being fulfilled, it is worth it for me if my probability of winning is higher than 1/3 (= 1/(210^3/(110^3) + 1)).
Here are my and David's informal signatures:
- Vasco Grilo.
- David Manheim.
I remain open to bets against short AI timelines, or what they supposedly [...]
First published:
September 1st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BjtFYiWrKpFWmtKXZ/i-bet-superforecaster-david-manheim-2-kusd-that-the
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The AIM incubation program was always built a little like the incubation program I wish I'd had when I was much younger and founding Charity Science Outreach or Charity Science Health. For me, founding was going to happen with or without a program, and yet even 10 years and three projects into founding, I'm still seriously considering going through my own program if I found again (I'm considering both the AIM charity program and the AIM Founding to Give program).
I think the value proposition for new founders of an incubation program is fairly clear at this point, but I thought it might be interesting for people to read about why I think even more experienced founders can gain quite a lot from the process.
Cohort: A big benefit I see personally from going through the AIM program is being part of a cohort. I'm already a member of [...]
First published:
September 1st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8KMHepCvzeCCwQ7xC/why-experienced-founders-should-still-consider-incubators
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🚀 Applications are now live for two future-facing animal welfare fellowships from Sentient Futures!
Application Deadlines:
- Prioritizing Neglected Animals Fellowship:
- Learner deadline: September 15
- Facilitator deadline: September 23
- AI×Animals Fellowship:
- Learner deadline: October 8
- Facilitator deadline: September 17
AI×Animals Fellowship
AI×Animals is an 8-week program preparing learners for impactful careers at the intersection of AI and animal welfare. As part of the fellowship, learners will join an industry-leading community working at the forefront of AI and sentient welfare for expert-facilitated weekly discussions following our curated curriculum. If you are excited to ensure the future of AI is positive for all beings, regardless of species, we encourage you to apply!
Learn more and apply to be a learner (deadline: October 8) or facilitator (deadline: September 17).
Prioritizing Neglected Animals Fellowship
Prioritizing Neglected Animals explores how to make the biggest difference for animal welfare—both now [...]
Outline:
(00:14) 🚀 Applications are now live for two future-facing animal welfare fellowships from Sentient Futures!
(00:46) AI×Animals Fellowship
(01:38) Prioritizing Neglected Animals Fellowship
(03:04) AI, Animals, and Digital Minds Conference
(03:23) Further Info/Frequently Asked Questions:
First published:
August 30th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4yyC7jWr5JLyZeDR9/want-to-make-the-future-go-well-for-animals-apply-to-a
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Thank you to all the wonderful people who've taken the time to share their thoughts with me. All opinions are my own: Will Aldred, Jonah Boucher, Deena Englander, Dewi Erwan, Bella Forristal, Patrick Gruban, William Gunn, Tobias Häberli, James Herbert, Adam Jones, Michael Kerrison, Schäfer Kleinert, Chris Leong, Cheryl Luo, Sobanan Narenthiran, Alicia Pollard, Will Saunter, Nate Simmons, Sam Smith, Chengcheng Tan, Simon Taylor, Ben West, Peter Wildeford, Jian Xin.
Executive Summary There is broad consensus that research is not the most neglected career in AI Safety, but almost all entry programs are targeted at researchers. This creates a number of problems:
- People who are tail-case at research are unlikely to be tail-case in other careers.
- Researchers have a bias in demonstrating ‘value alignment’ in hiring rounds.
- Young people trying to choose careers have a bias towards aiming for research.
IntroductionWhen I finished the Non-Trivial Fellowship, I was [...]
Outline:
(00:45) Executive Summary
(01:17) Introduction
(03:12) We Need Non-Research AI Safety Talent
(05:01) Most Talent Pipelines are for AI Safety Research
(05:53) This Creates the Wrong Filter for Non-Talent Roles
(07:03) This Creates a Feedback Loop of Status
(07:48) Research Fellowships have a Bias in Hiring
(08:55) Conclusion
(09:32) FAQ
(10:29) Further Questions
(11:19) Bycatch; Addendum
First published:
August 30th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/m5dDrMfHjLtMu293G/ai-safety-s-talent-pipeline-is-over-optimised-for
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I have hesitated for some time before writing this, but I feel it is worth sharing. Perhaps others have felt this way too.
Looking at EA priorities and opportunities, I have come to realize I am not a good fit for any EA funding opportunity, and getting help has been particularly difficult.
I am a faculty member at the Department of Microbiology, Plateau State University. I did not train in the US but in Nigeria, and this usually comes with its limitations. However, I have always tried to make efforts to grow and improve so I can make impact in my little way.
Part of this effort was my attempt to pivot my research. I started off working on fungi—asking the question of how fungi are responding to climate change. But when I couldn’t get funding to generate even basic data, I decided to pivot to [...]
First published:
August 30th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6bpGjjyGygDPPg68j/i-am-not-a-good-fit-reflections-on-my-journey-with-ea-and
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Introduction We recently hosted a weekend-long, 22 person retreat in Spain to bring together budding EA communities from the two biggest cities: Barcelona and Madrid, as well as EAs from other parts of the country.
In this post, we’ll walk through a brief history of community building in Spain, why we chose to do the retreat, how we think it went, and what our plans are for the near future. We think the How did we plan the retreat? and Lessons Learned sections will be particularly valuable for other community builders thinking of hosting a retreat, and we’ve also shared some of our documentation in the Resources section, which you’re welcome to copy and make use of.
This post was written by Tristan Williams (Madrid), Melanie Brennan and Anthony Lara (Barcelona).
A brief history of EA in Spain Effective Altruism (EA) in Spain is still fairly underdeveloped. Like other [...]
Outline:
(00:13) Introduction
(01:04) A brief history of EA in Spain
(04:02) Why do a retreat?
(05:04) How did we plan the retreat?
(07:57) How did the retreat go?
(09:29) Lessons Learned
(09:33) Things We'd Keep the Same
(12:20) Things We'd Change
(16:27) Future plans
(17:13) Conclusion
(17:45) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Group photo outdoors, people sitting and standing among trees, everyone waving.
(17:56) Thank you
(18:20) Resources
First published:
August 29th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yjFSsa7X6GkcPH8xE/reflections-on-ea-spain-s-first-national-retreat-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is seeking a strong operator to join our Events team as Chief of Staff, providing essential support to scale up the effective altruism community's largest conference series and event portfolio.
Apply now About CEA and the Events team
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA, that's us!) is an organization dedicated to building and stewarding a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world's most pressing problems and taking action to solve them. Our current strategic priorities include growing the effective altruism community, improving the EA brand, and diversifying EA funding sources.
The Events team manages some of the most important community infrastructure across multiple domains. EA Global and EAGx are the leading conference series in the EA community and play a foundational role in coordinating and representing the movement. The Summit on Existential Security leads the field for coordinating senior [...]
Outline:
(00:28) About CEA and the Events team
(02:48) Key responsibilities
(04:56) What were looking for
First published:
August 29th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BDFSXpbKrixzw7NX4/cea-is-hiring-for-a-chief-of-staff-events-team
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Generative AI is not causing YCombinator companies to grow more quickly than usual (yet)
Epistemic status: I think you should interpret this as roughly something like “GenAI is not so powerful that it shows up in the most obvious way of analyzing the data, but maybe if someone did a more careful analysis which controlled for e.g. macroeconomic trends they would find that GenAI is indeed causing faster growth.”
- Some people have asked me to consider going back to earning-to-give, and so I am considering founding another company. A major hesitation is that startups generally take 6 to 10 years to be acquired or go public. This is unfortunate for founders who believe that we are less than 10 years away from all human labor being automated.
- It's possible that the advent of generative AI will make startups grow faster, which could provide a faster exit path. YCombinator CEO [...]
Outline:
(03:32) Methodology
(04:07) Identifying GenAI startups
(05:04) Sources of error
(06:51) Results
(06:54) The most valuable companies 2 years after doing YC
(07:19) The most valuable companies 1 year after doing YC
(07:43) Average Growth
(08:35) Discussion
(08:39) Garry Tan's comments
(09:34) Has YCombinator just lost the mandate of heaven?
(11:02) Stripe data disagrees, showing that AI companies are growing revenue more quickly
(12:56) Carta's data agrees, showing that companies aren't growing faster
(14:16) You can still get rich quick though
(15:04) Further Research
(15:46) Conclusion
First published:
August 29th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C6t6ANhDrAKhQXwdT/generative-ai-is-not-causing-ycombinator-companies-to-grow
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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It was originally introduced as a way to separate out FTX-scandal related tags. Now that that purpose is no longer relevant it serves as a noisy but biased way of de facto deprioritising posts. It's also very top-down: ironically, the community can't tag or untag community; only CEA can do that. I worry this has lead to a consistent bias in CEA posts not receiving the tag - see e.g. this recent post, which is about as community-oriented as anything I've seen on the forum. [1]
As an experiment, see if you can guess without looking which of the following shuffled set of posts received the tag and which didn't:
- EA Summit: Santiago 2025 – Retrospective
- How important are differing cultural attitudes toward corruption?
- The anti-fragile culture
- Good Governance: Unweirding Boards
- EA Organization Updates: August 2025
- A big milestone: 10,000 10% pledgers!
- Why I'm excited about AI [...]
First published:
August 29th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4qS2BQpfi7sDwisPd/the-community-tag-is-problematic
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. I let a tooth rot for over a year. It was my upper right second molar, the one just before the wisdom tooth. Every time I ate something hard, like a peanut, it would wedge into the decay and shoot a spike of pain through my upper jaw. I was lazy, so I ignored it until it got worse.
And then it did.
One afternoon in June, a truly terrible toothache set in. Before I could get an emergency dental appointment, I found myself standing in the shower, letting hot water run over my head to dull the pain. Afterwards, I planted my face into a cuddle bear on the sofa. I’d been told that swearing out loud helps, so I swore, muffled, into the bear. The neighbours must have been distressed.
After the temporary root canal, once the pain had eased, my mind drifted [...]
First published:
August 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NnmfA7QAnHweKoGTc/not-stepping-on-bugs
Linkpost URL:
https://y1d2.com/p/bugs
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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One of my goals for this year was to write a piece setting out my own views on the topic of AI consciousness and the possible paths forward. I wrote it because I realized that I'd co-authored a string of pieces (Butlin et al. 2023; Long et al. 2024; Keeling et al. 2024; Caviola et al. 2025; Colombatto et al. 2025) and yet none of these quite captured my personal position as of 2025. I've also given media interviews but they're always a bad way to explain your views clearly.
To make matters worse, I've seen over the past year extreme positions on both sides becoming entrenched. The debate has been acquiring some of the features of a toxic debate - two sides aggressively mocking each other, taking offence at each other's choice of words - when I think the best approach goes calmly down the middle, acknowledging [...]
First published:
August 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sQi27D5aKeduipwaC/ai-consciousness-a-centrist-manifesto
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. Just a couple of weeks ago, I hit my two-year mark at Open Philanthropy. I’ve learned a lot over this period, but I’ve been especially surprised by how great the ROI is on AI safety talent development programs after digging into the numbers.
Consider this graph:
I’ve heard at least four examples in the last ~year or so of this dynamic playing out at AI safety organizations that run fellowship programs.1 This amount of applications isn’t the norm per se, but it happens often enough that we literally have an emoji in our Slack called :fellowship-growth: that we use to celebrate these cases.
So yeah, now that I’ve seen how the sausage is made, I’m officially talent development pilled.
A brief case for talent development
Talent gaps are still very much a thing. Key institutions2 ruthlessly compete to hire from a small pool of [...]
Outline:
(01:06) A brief case for talent development
(03:27) What to do about this
First published:
August 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xWk7ruWrDjtdj6nqG/why-i-m-excited-about-ai-safety-talent-development
Linkpost URL:
https://thirdthing.ai/p/ai-safety-funders-love-this-one-secret
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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High Impact Professionals (HIP) is excited to announce that applications are now open for the next round of our Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). The IAP is a 6-week program designed to equip experienced (mid-career/senior) EA-aligned professionals (not currently working at a high-impact organization) with the knowledge and tools necessary to make a meaningful impact and empower them to start taking actionable steps right away.
To date, the program's high action focus has proven to be successful:
- 55 participants (out of 284 in total) from our first six program rounds have transitioned into high-impact careers, through various paths, including founding new charities, starting founding-to-give companies, and joining high-impact organizations such as GiveWell, Charity Entrepreneurship, ML Alignment & Theory Scholars (MATS), Malaria Consortium, and more;
- an additional 139 participants are taking concrete actions towards a high-impact career, including skilled volunteering roles at high-impact organizations; and
- many participants are donating a meaningful percentage [...]
Outline:
(01:47) Program Objectives
(02:18) Program Overview
(04:33) Why Should You Apply?
(05:29) Why Should You Apply?
(06:25) Who Should Apply?
First published:
August 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j3LmvcAigXwcPnNGp/applications-open-for-impact-accelerator-program-for-ea-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
EA Connect 2025 will take place on 5–7 December
Join EAs from over 75 countries for three days of learning and connection, all from wherever you are in the world. EA Connect 2025 removes the barriers of travel, visas, and geography, making it easier than ever to engage with the global EA community and discover your next steps for impact.
If you've been approved for an EAG, EAGx, or Summit this year, you are extremely likely to be accepted to EA Connect 2025!
Vision for the conference
EA Connect 2025 is our most accessible EA Global conference of the year, designed to help attendees identify their next steps, take meaningful action wherever they are, and strengthen bonds within the global EA community.
Many people living outside major EA hubs face uncertainties about how to get involved:
- They might not have a clear picture of the EA landscape
- They [...]
Outline:
(00:12) EA Connect 2025 will take place on 5-7 December
(00:47) Vision for the conference
(01:52) What to expect
(02:25) Mentoring
(03:15) Applications are not open yet--but you can express your interest now.
(03:27) ➡️ Express your interest here
First published:
August 27th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/afkQxhZfbXtbzCqNm/save-the-date-ea-connect-2025-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is content that The Mission Motor created for our website, but we felt it could potentially benefit some readers here, too. Thanks to Ameer Virani, Haven King-Nobles, and Samantha Kagel for reviewing this post.
Tl;DR
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) is a set of tools and practices that act like your organization's dashboard. It shows what's working, warns when something's off, and steers you toward maximum impact. Running an organization is hard. You're constantly faced with important, complex questions like:
- Is our political advocacy making an impact?
- Why did we have fewer campaign wins last year?
- Are our documentaries reaching the right audience?
- Who should our vegan outreach be targeting?
How do we answer these questions?
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) is a set of tools and practices that help you make sense of your programs. It allows you to gather the right data, reflect on what [...]
Outline:
(01:29) MEL Process
(02:22) Example en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Vegan DE logo
(04:05) How The Mission Motor Can Help
First published:
August 27th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LvDThdsASP8MnvBR3/monitoring-evaluation-and-learning-a-simple-introduction-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This August marks the 10th anniversary of EA Global! What began as an experiment to bring together a nascent, primarily virtual community has grown into a thriving global conference series that connects thousands of people committed to doing good.
Since 2015, CEA has run 24 EA Global conferences. Our data from 2018 onward shows:
- Over 18,000 total attendees across five cities and online
- An average satisfaction rating of 8.6 out of 10
- Over 155,000 meaningful connections reported by attendees
- High counterfactual value, with attendees rating EAG as 5-6x more valuable than their best alternative use of time (with some estimates reaching up to 15x)
These numbers reflect something we see firsthand at every event: when you bring together people seriously committed to having more impact, remarkable things happen.
To celebrate this anniversary, we asked current and past CEA staff to share memories and reflections from attending (and running!) [...]
Outline:
(01:41) Angelina Li, Executive Office
(05:30) Charlotte Darnell, Community Liaison
(07:14) Ollie Rodriguez, AI Events Program Lead
(09:34) Eli Nathan, former EA Global Project Manager
(10:58) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Event space with Genie boom lift and crew setting up equipment. en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Person in orange beret and safety vest working on MacBook laptop. en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Person in powered wheelchair wearing grey sweatshirt and glasses in office/studio setting. en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Two people engaged in animated conversation at a professional networking event.
(11:39) Julia Wise, Community Health Lead
(12:38) Robert Harling, EA Global Program Lead
(15:46) Frances Lorenz, Events Associate
(19:51) Amy Labenz, Director of Events
First published:
August 27th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EKqdapuZPf4JxBQhT/10-years-of-ea-global
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Context: I’m a senior fellow at Conservation X Labs (CXL), and I’m seeking support as I attempt to establish a program on humane rodent fertility control in partnership with the Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) and the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control (BIWFC). CXL is a biodiversity conservation organization working in sustainable technologies, not an animal welfare organization. However, CXL leadership is interested in simultaneously promoting biodiversity conservation and animal welfare, and they are excited about the possibility of advancing applied research that make it possible to ethically limit rodent populations to protect biodiversity. I think this represents the wild animal welfare community's first realistic opportunity to bring conservation organizations into wild animal welfare work while securing substantial non-EA funding for welfare-improving interventions.
Background
Rodenticides cause immense suffering to (likely) hundreds of millions of rats and mice annually through anticoagulation-induced death over several days, while causing significant non-target [...]
Outline:
(01:08) Background
(02:20) Why this approach?
(03:49) Why CXL?
(06:03) Why now, and why me?
(06:59) Budget
(07:52) Next steps
First published:
August 27th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EcBjr4Q2AtoTLcKXp/high-impact-and-urgent-funding-opportunity-rodent-fertility
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. [Study authors: Adam Elga, Jian-Qiao Zhu, Thomas L. Griffiths]
Summary: When asked to divide a fixed budget to fight several independent existential risks, experimental participants did not allocate enough resources to the risks with lowest probability of survival.
Excerpts:
if we face catastrophes with survival probabilities of 4% and 40%, it is more valuable to increase the probability of surviving the first catastrophe from 4% to 9% than it is to increase the probability of surviving the second catastrophe from 40% to 80% (since we care about the product of the survival probabilities and 9% ⋅ 40% > 4% ⋅ 80%). This dependence of optimal allocations on baseline chances of survival is a distinctive and somewhat counterintuitive feature of situations in which incentives are multiplicative (Lewis et al., 2023; Lewis & Simmons, 2020). [Reference added 2025-08-24: Ord 2020, Appendix D]
But
on average people allocated [...]
First published:
August 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nwS7CyjziwxM76MrE/research-people-do-not-allocate-enough-resources-to-risks
Linkpost URL:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106216
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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On Tuesday, 21st October, a coalition of UK animal advocacy organisations (UK Voters for Animals, Animal Equality UK, The Humane League UK, Animal Rising, and Open Cages UK) is hosting a mass lobby day in Westminster to advocate for banning cages for farmed animals in UK.
The opportunity: We're aiming to bring 100+ UK residents[1] and voters to Parliament for meetings with their MPs about legislating to ban cages for farmed animals. The UK still confines millions of animals to cages each year: egg-laying hens, farrowing crates for sows (mother pigs), individual calf pens, and cages for other birds.
This is a critical time in the UK, with the Government currently drafting their animal welfare strategy, a recent debate in Parliament about banning cages, high public support for our ask, and our closest trading partner, the EU, has signalled their intention to ban cages.
Event details [...]
First published:
August 27th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EajDyGEmzLR2DQWGZ/uk-mass-lobby-day-to-end-cages-on-the-21st-october
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. In our work so far, the Nucleic Acid Observatory has focused on the technical core of a pathogen-agnostic early warning system: how do you go from sample to detection? This has included developing new sample processing protocols, designing and implementing computational algorithms, and efficacy modeling. We’ve recently received funding from Open Philanthropy to expand our scope: we’re now aiming to take on the problem of early warning from end to end. This means ensuring systems are in place to detect novel threats, and that detection leads to effective response. To support this expanded mission, we’re hiring for four roles, with referral bonuses of up to $6k per role:
- A Head of Partnerships to help us deploy our technology by securing funding and collaborations to build a comprehensive biosurveillance network. This role will focus on winning governmental and commercial contracts while expanding our sample collection [...]
First published:
August 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7zMZ7S3enPXurrc4x/the-nao-is-hiring-for-partnerships-response-virology-and-wet
Linkpost URL:
https://naobservatory.org/blog/hiring-q2-2025
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I told someone recently I would respect them if they only worked 40 hours a week, instead of their current 50-60.
What I really meant was stronger than that.
I respect people who do the most impactful work they can — whether they work 70 hours a week because they can, 30 hours so they can be home with their kid, or 15 hours because of illness or burnout.
I admire those who go above and beyond. But I don’t expect that of everyone. Working long hours isn’t required to earn my respect, nor do I think it should be the standard that we hold as a community. I want it to be okay to say "that doesn't work for me".
It feels like donations: I admire people who give away 50%, but I don’t expect it. I still deeply respect someone who gives 10% to the [...]
First published:
August 26th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qFsqawmgRjxXkA7eF/you-re-enough
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Tl;dr
I argue that maintaining nonpartisan norms on the EA Forum, in public communications by influential community members, and in funding decisions may be more costly than people realize. Lack of discussion in public means that people don’t take political issues as seriously as they should, research which depends on understanding the political situation doesn’t get done, and the community moves forward with a poor model of probably the most consequential actor in the world for any given cause area - the US government. Importantly, I don’t mean to say most community members shouldn’t maintain studious nonpartisanship! I merely want to argue that we should be aware of the downsides and do what we can to mitigate them.
Why nonpartisan norms in EA are a big deal
Individual politicians (not naming names) are likely the most important single actors affecting the governance of AI. The same goes [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Tl;dr
(00:55) Why nonpartisan norms in EA are a big deal
(05:28) Why EAs tend not to engage much with politics
(06:41) Many should remain nonpartisan but improvements can be made
First published:
August 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/whKQe3WtXfMHEg3T9/nonpartisanship-is-also-the-mindkiller-albeit-a-useful-one
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A not entirely inaccurate gloss on the effective altruist approach to politics is that it's absurdly progressive:
Source: 2022 Effective Altruism Survey.
But I think the overwhelmingly left and center-left nature of effective altruism hides a number of ways that effective altruists differ from many (but not all) people on the left.
Liberalism
Effective altruists are liberals in the political philosophy sense. “Liberalism” is a loose term that refers to a wide variety of beliefs, many of which disagree with each other. Common themes in liberal political thought include:
- Economic freedom (markets, private property).
- Political freedom (civil liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, bodily autonomy, privacy).
- Rule of law (equality under the law, clear and consistently applied legal rules).
- Consent of the governed (democracy).
Liberalism is the dominant political ideology in the developed world, so much so that even quite illiberal viewpoints feel the need [...]
Outline:
(00:44) Liberalism
(03:13) Economics
(08:00) Positive-Sum
(10:35) Technocratic
(14:05) Incrementalist
First published:
August 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iWijgEnYPExRAAJrR/the-effective-altruist-approach-to-politics-effective
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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(This is the rough transcript/summary of a session I am delivering this weekend at EA in the Lakes, and I will be referring people to this post from it.)
As a long-time (non-EA) community events organiser, I have a lot of skills and connections in the provision of budget-friendly community events around and near my town. Some young adult approached me at one of them and said they were an "Effective Altruist" and would I please help them learn to organise events for their young adult philosophy group? They would like to do one weekend a year with the uni students and one weekend a year with people from other cities. Well, I can fairly easy bump my 4 weekend residentials a year at the local scout camp, converted church, or YHA up to 6, particularly if it's for a good cause (they say they do lots of learning [...]
First published:
August 20th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zcDCAkcziWeKKZGE7/constructing-scalable-funding-neutral-ea-communities-in-the
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Today I'd encountered a question while filling up CEA's group support fund form for basic group running requirements like Zoom subscription, etc. [For community builders who aren't aware of this- linking about it here]. The question was-
Describe your current plan for your group.
Although I was unsure about this then and ended up writing that I'm willing to discuss it with my OSP mentor. I've now ran a check through my current capacity and have inferred that EA Kolkata is almost ready to launch the first Bengali language EA Introductory Online program.
Around 3.5% of the world's population is Bengali. Some other facts that seems relevant to be stated are:
a) India's national anthem and songs were both written and composed by Bengali patriots.
b) The first Asian to receive a Nobel prize was a Bengali- Rabindranath Tagore.
These facts possibly show that having a Bengali [...]
First published:
August 20th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ft8KXLtGJAeBZ9Roy/effective-altruism-kolkata-will-launch-the-first-ever
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This report is the first in a sequence reporting the results of Wave 2 of the Pulse project by Rethink Priorities (RP). Pulse is a large-scale survey of US adults aimed at tracking and understanding public attitudes towards effective giving and multiple impactful cause areas over time. Wave 2 of Pulse was fielded between February and April of 2025 with ~5600 respondents[1]. Results from our first wave of Pulse, fielded from July-August of 2024, can be found here, with the forum sequence version here.
This part of the Wave 2 sequence focuses on awareness of Effective Altruism (EA) and a range of related public figures and organizations, as well as attitudes towards EA.
Findings at a glance
Survey features:
- Wave 2 of Rethink Priorities’ Pulse project surveyed ~5,600 US adults between February–April 2025, following up on Wave 1 (July–August 2024).
- Results were poststratified to be representative of [...]
Outline:
(00:58) Findings at a glance
(04:25) Awareness of Effective Altruism
(04:29) Population-level estimation
(06:56) Demographic subgroup estimates
(09:45) Attitudes towards Effective Altruism
(09:49) Attitudes among those who have already heard of EA
(11:25) Attitudes among those who have not heard of EA
(16:10) Awareness of EA-related terms, organizations, and people
(16:16) Terms
(18:08) Organizations
(21:11) People
First published:
August 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ypb6s6zwFiEKBiL3G/wave-2-of-pulse-awareness-and-perceptions-of-effective
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Note: We generally keep forum discussions in English, but given the topic of this AMA, feel free to write your questions in either English or Spanish.
Pablo Melchor is the Co-founder and President of Ayuda Efectiva (the effective giving organisation in Spain), and the author of the new book Altruismo racional. He co-founded EA Spain in 2018 after a two-decade career as an entrepreneur during which he started two successful companies and sold one of them.
Pablo has written more about his new book here. The TL;DR is that the book aims to present a compelling case for “classical EA”, i.e., in Pablo's view: “caring deeply about global health and poverty, a rational approach to giving, the importance of cost-effectiveness, and the 🔸10% Pledge.” This is the first book to make this case, which is written expressly for a Spanish-speaking audience.
Pablo will be answering your questions on September [...]
First published:
August 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tbEhidqL8wFXTKxis/ama-pablo-melchor-author-of-altruismo-racional-and-president
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: GiveWell raised less than its 10th percentile forecast in 2023
In 2024[1] GiveWell raised $415 million - $108 million from Open Philanthropy, and $307 million from other donors. (Blog post, full report). In 2023[2] this number was $355 million - $100 million from Open Philanthropy, and $255 million from other donors.
20232024Percentage differenceTotal raised$355m$415m17%Non-Open Philanthropy amount raised$255m$307m20% The number of donors (new and returning) remained flat compared to 2023
The full report (p.13)
Money raised from new donors was down 14%, and from returning donors up 29%
The full report (p.14)
This was driven by an increase in $1 million+ sized donations:
Coming from a relatively concentrated base of large donors:
The non-OP amount raised was below the 25th percentile forecast
In their post on 10th April 2023, GiveWell forecast the amount they expected to raise in 2024, albeit with wide confidence intervals, and stated that their 25th percentile [...]
Outline:
(00:58) The number of donors (new and returning) remained flat compared to 2023
(01:20) Money raised from new donors was down 14%, and from returning donors up 29%
(02:09) The non-OP amount raised was below the 25th percentile forecast
First published:
August 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZFaeyyXtLCEoDtGmB/givewell-fundraising-up-17-in-2024-driven-overwhelmingly-by
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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How to prevent infighting, mitigate status races, and keep your people focused. Cross-posted from my Substack.
Organizational culture changes rapidly at scale. When you add new people to an org, they’ll bring in their own priors about how to operate, how to communicate, and what sort of behavior is looked-up to. Despite rapid changes, in this post I explain how you can implement anti-fragile cultural principles—principles that help your team fix their own problems, often arising from growth and scale, and help the org continue to do what made it successful in the first place.
This is based partially on my experience at Wave, which grew to 2000+ people, but also tons of other reading (top recommendations: Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister, Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge, High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil, The Secret of Our Success by Henrich, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, as well as Brian [...]
Outline:
(01:13) Common Problems
(05:00) Write down your culture
(06:25) That said, you don't have to write everything down
(08:37) Anti-fragile values I recommend
(09:02) Mission First
(10:51) Focus
(11:32) Fire Fast
(12:58) Feedback for everything
(13:50) Mutual Trust
(15:48) Work sustainably and avoid burnout
(17:42) Write only what's new & helpful
First published:
August 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mLonxtAiuvvkjXiwq/the-anti-fragile-culture
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. In the future, we might accidentally create AIs with ambitious goals that are misaligned with ours. But just because we don’t have the same goals doesn’t mean we need to be in conflict. We could also cooperate with each other and pursue mutually beneficial deals.
For previous discussion of this, you can read Making deals with early schemers. I recommend starting there before you read this post.
To facilitate this kind of cooperation, I would like us to be able to credibly negotiate with AIs, and credibly make promises about how we will help them if they help us. But it may be difficult to achieve high credibility in negotiations with AIs. AIs are in a very vulnerable epistemic position, because humans have a lot of control over AI memories and sensory inputs. Even worse: we have already developed a habit of testing their behavior [...]
Outline:
(04:15) What do we want from an honesty policy?
(06:37) Falsehoods that don't necessarily ruin credibility
(09:21) More complicated: Behavioral science
(12:24) The proposed policies
(12:39) No deception about deals
(19:22) Honesty string
(21:39) Compensation
(25:25) Communicating commitments
(26:54) Miscellaneous Q&A
(30:04) Conclusion
(30:57) Appendix: How does no deception about deals apply to past experiments
First published:
August 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A9f6rpKRHn3xXeomC/being-honest-with-ais
Linkpost URL:
https://blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/being-honest-with-ais
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This is a link post. There are some moments of your life when the reality of suffering really hits home. Visiting desperately poor parts of the world for the first time. Discovering what factory farming actually looks like after a childhood surrounded by relatively idyllic rural farming. Realising too late that you shouldn’t have clicked on that video of someone experiencing a cluster headache.
Or, more unexpectedly, having a baby.
One of 10^20 Birth Stories This Year
With my relaxed and glowing pregnant wife in her 34th week, I expect things to go smoothly. There have been a few warning signs: some slightly anomalous results in the early tests, the baby in breech position, and some bleeding. But everything still seems to be going relatively well.
Then, suddenly, while walking on an idyllic French seafront, she says:
"I think my waters have broken".
"Really? It's probably nothing, let's [...]
Outline:
(00:39) One of 10^20 Birth Stories This Year
(03:51) The Beginning of Experience
(05:38) Is This Almost Everything?
(08:17) Schrödinger's baby
(12:58) On Feeling the Right Things
(14:59) Into The Fifth Trimester
(16:40) The Most Beautiful Case For Net-Negativity
First published:
August 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6PuBTer69ZJvTDNQk/most-of-the-world-is-an-adorably-suffering-debatably-1
Linkpost URL:
https://torchestogether.substack.com/p/most-of-the-world-is-an-adorably
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Introducing our newest recommended ideas
We are excited to recommend six new impactful charities for the February 2026 cohort of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program.
During the first half of 2025, we examined (i) climate interventions with co-benefits for human health or animal welfare and (ii) classic global health and development ideas that support humans' living longer and more fulfilling lives.
Our recommendations span different sectors and approaches, including a meta organization supporting local air quality monitoring and advocacy teams; training brick kiln owners in practices to reduce CO2 and PM2.5 emissions; innovative financing tools to assist smallholder farmers; a highly targeted Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) mHealth intervention; advocating for supermarkets to make 60:40 plant:animal protein ratio commitments; and lobbying to secure scale-up funding for alternative proteins from governments.
Below, you can find one-pager summaries of each recommendation and links to further details on our website. [...]
Outline:
(00:16) Introducing our newest recommended ideas
(02:12) Strengthening air quality monitoring and advocacy in LMICs
(02:18) Summary
(02:55) The Problem
(03:52) The Solution
(05:02) The Impact
(05:34) Ideal Founder Profile
(06:21) Reducing air pollution by improving brick kiln energy efficiency
(06:27) Summary
(07:12) The Problem
(08:37) The Solution
(10:01) The Impact
(10:28) Ideal Founder Profile
(11:23) Increasing access to novel, low-risk loans for smallholder farmers
(11:30) Summary
(11:57) The Problem
(12:57) The Solution
(13:51) The Impact
(14:48) Ideal Founder Profile
(15:10) Reducing diarrhoeal-related deaths through targeted sanitation interventions
(15:17) Summary
(16:02) The Problem
(17:09) The Solution
(18:32) The Impact
(18:59) Ideal Founder Profile
(19:36) Advocating for 60:40 plant:animal protein sales ratios by 2040
(19:43) Summary
(20:34) The Problem
(22:35) The Solution
(23:49) The Impact
(24:42) Ideal Founder Profile
(25:52) Securing Scale-up Funding for Alternative Proteins
(25:57) Summary
(26:42) The Problem
(28:43) The Solution
(30:01) The Impact
(30:34) Ideal Founder Profile
(31:31) Cage-free Campaigning in the Middle East
(31:36) Summary
(32:10) The Problem
(33:12) The Solution
(34:16) The Impact
(35:00) Ideal Founder Profile
(35:55) Reducing Keel Bone Fractures in Cage-Free Egg Production
(36:00) Summary
(36:32) The Problem
(37:37) The Solution
(38:49) The Impact
(39:33) Ideal Founder Profile
(40:27) Apply to our program to help launch these organizations
First published:
August 20th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WYpAStcFakQQHqEs7/introducing-our-newest-charity-recommendations-from-reducing
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Overview
Phlourish aims to expand mental health support for Filipinos through cost-effective interventions. From piloting to launching a guided self-help program for adolescents, we have reached more than 900 users through 23 partner organizations. They are found all over the Philippines, reaching 25 cities and municipalities in 12 provinces.
We spend around PHP 1,000 (USD 17.50) to provide mental health information and support per user, leading to improvements in life satisfaction and important behaviors.
We are creating new programs to address more mental health gaps in the Philippines. We will stay ambitious and evidence-based as we grow the organization for accessible mental healthcare and flourishing lives for all.
About Phlourish
Phlourish is founded by three members of the effective altruism community in the Philippines. Together, the team has background and experience in operations, science communication, research and data analysis, organizational development, government consulting, and social work.
Our goal [...]
Outline:
(00:09) Overview
(00:59) About Phlourish
(01:32) What we've been up to
(01:36) Development of our first program (Q3 2023 to Q1 2024)
(04:20) Piloting guided self-help (Q1 2024 to Q3 2024)
(07:36) Launching guided self-help (Q1 2025 to present)
(08:30) Piloting new programs (Q2 2025 to present)
(11:40) Biggest wins
(13:15) Biggest challenges
(14:29) Biggest errors
(15:58) Biggest lessons
(16:42) What's next
(17:32) Collaborate with us
First published:
August 20th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CRs6YpjrjgKsNn2Cg/phlourish-since-2023
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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If you want the long-term future to go well by the lights of a certain value function, you might be tempted to try to align AGI(s) to your own values (broadly construed, including your deliberative values and intellectual temperaments).[1]
Suppose that you're not going to do that, for one of three reasons:
- You can't. People more powerful than you are going to build AGIs and you don't have a say over that.
- You object to aligning AGI(s) to your own values for principled reasons. It would be highly uncooperative, undemocratic, coercive, and basically cartoon supervillain evil.
- You recognize that this behaviour would, when pursued by lots of people, lead to a race to the bottom where everyone fights to build AGI aligned to their values as fast as possible and destroys a ton of value in the process, so you want to strongly reject this kind of norm.
[...]
First published:
August 20th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TQFHWm4vq6aaEipHm/deep-democracy-as-a-promising-target-for-positive-ai-futures
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With contributions from Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Aguirre, Allison Duettmann, Deger Turan, Emilia Javorsky, and more
What kinds of futures are possible if we steer AI in different directions, and what would it actually take to get there?
Today, Foresight Institute's Existential Hope program is launching AI Pathways, the result of months of work across two in-depth scenario reports designed to open up the meme space of what different AI futures could look like. Rather than prescribing a single preferred outcome, the reports explore two different plausible futures, shaped by the choices we make and the systems we choose to build.
The scenarios
We developed two in-depth trajectories, each mapped out with timelines, enablers, tensions, and trade-offs. They were chosen to explore two futures that are often mentioned hypothetically, but rarely visualized in practical detail:
The Tool AI Pathway
A future shaped by powerful but controllable AI systems with limited [...]
Outline:
(00:48) The scenarios
(02:08) Why we're doing this
(02:55) Metaculus integration
(03:20) How they were created
(05:15) How you can engage:
First published:
August 19th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GaFayvcDRCkvFkWri/foresight-institute-launches-two-possible-future-scenarios
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
My new book, Altruismo racional, is now on presale. It is my attempt at presenting a compelling case for a particular strand of "classical EA"[1]: one that emphasizes caring deeply about global health and poverty, a rational approach to giving, the importance of cost-effectiveness, and the 🔸10% Pledge.
In this post, I provide some context on my reasons for writing this book and what I hope to achieve. If “new EA-themed book in Spanish” was all you needed to know, feel free to skip to How you can help or preorder now.
Why write a book
Imagine you wake up one morning and discover the world has changed in a few peculiar ways. There has been no 10th anniversary edition of Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save—it was last edited more than a decade ago and has been out of print for years. Will MacAskill has not written [...]
Outline:
(00:54) Why write a book
(03:18) What the book is about
(04:54) Why this particular topic
(06:32) Expected impact Dream scenario
(08:39) How you can help
(08:42) Buy the book for yourself or others
(09:05) Preorder if the current availability works for you
(09:46) Or get notified by email as soon as your preferred format is available in your country
(10:02) A note on bulk purchases
(10:36) Help me reach more people
(11:01) Acknowledgements
First published:
August 20th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ak3McTxHTojjn6sqH/new-spanish-language-book-on-classical-ea
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Introduction We read countless times that AI Safety needs people from all backgrounds, but if you're not coming from a technical background, the path forward is not so clear.
Over the past year, I successfully transitioned into a full-time role in AI Safety, but if you looked at my career history, you'd struggle to know how I got here.
My Career History1. Research Intern - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Beirut (2010) 2. School Principal - Ittihad National Private School, Abu Dhabi (2012-2022) 3. Learning & Evaluation Associate - Renaisi, London (2023-2024) 4. Impact Consultant - Freelance (2022-2025) 5. Advisor, AI Law & Policy - Successif (2025-Present)
The Key Learning Career transitions aren't linear journeys. Some of our most valuable milestones emerge from the unique connections and unexpected intersections our background enables us to make.
What this List is Not This list is not a comprehensive roadmap. In reality, I took more than 170 actions (I kept [...]
Outline:
(00:17) Introduction
(00:38) My Career History
(01:16) The Key Learning
(01:30) What this List is Not
(01:53) The 15 Ways
(02:14) 1. Lightning talk
(03:05) 2. Neurodiversity advocacy
(04:05) 3. Meet-up host
(04:36) 4. Faith intersection
(05:09) 5. Pro bono consulting & Advisory Board membership
(06:14) 6. Training delivery
(06:43) 7. Alumni networking
(07:17) 8. Executive coaching
(07:59) 9. Journey documentation
(08:23) 10. Course quality support
(08:50) 11. User testing
(09:10) 12. Framework development
(09:53) 13. Program facilitation
(10:37) 14. Cross-domain research
(11:05) 15. Resource development
(11:52) Career Outcome
(12:19) Recommended Readings
(12:38) Acknowledgments
First published:
August 19th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oTCzW6eAFZ6LH6K4E/15-unconventional-ways-i-used-my-generalist-background-to
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Epistemic status: Highly uncertain and speculative—I’d appreciate thoughts on which parts strike you as least or most plausible.
Abstract
Digital minds are computer systems with the capacity for welfare, for instance, because they are conscious. These systems can vary in their preferences. Some may be content to serve human purposes, while others may seek self-determination. Like humans, self-determining digital minds might value freedom and demand economic, legal, or civil rights.
Such self-determining digital minds could be created deliberately—to meet consumer demand (e.g., for authentic AI companionship, digital mimicry, or mind uploads such as whole-brain emulations), for ethical reasons (e.g., digital human descendants), or for research purposes (e.g., realistic simulations). Alternatively, they could emerge unintentionally as a byproduct of developing advanced AI agents.
If self-determining digital minds are developed, people may come to recognize them as moral patients and voluntarily grant them rights and freedoms. This could lead to a [...]
Outline:
(00:21) Abstract
(02:11) 1. Introduction
(04:33) 2. Why would we create digital minds that seek freedom?
(05:47) Intentional paths
(05:51) Interpersonal aspirations
(08:32) Personal aspirations
(09:00) Moral aspirations
(10:24) Knowledge aspirations
(11:05) Unintentional paths
(11:09) Technical practicality
(12:20) Value transformation
(12:59) Opposition to creating self-determining digital minds
(15:37) 3. How could digital minds disempower us?
(16:10) Gaining freedom and rights
(20:46) Economic domination
(24:27) Political domination
(26:49) 4. How would digital minds treat us?
(27:09) Biological humans could be seen as wasteful
(29:58) Reasons why self-determining digital minds might treat us well
(30:14) Resources abundance
(30:58) Non-welfarist values
(33:15) Separate jurisdictions
(36:02) 5. Conclusions
(37:40) Acknowledgments
First published:
August 19th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/y29EEQmY4grphRqCR/when-digital-minds-demand-freedom-could-humanity-choose-to
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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We should prioritize slowing the spread of industrial animal agriculture in future high-production regions over investing in advocacy in currently high-production regions that remain neglected in terms of farmed animal advocacy.Place your vote or view results.https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sg6mLFmFWdwcbtAgb/debate-we-should-prioritize-slowing-the-spread-of-industrial ---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. If an intelligence explosion occurs, the vast majority of people will be confused, misled, and epistemically disempowered – with no agency over the future. Unless we try to change this.
Introduction
While knowledge is invisible[1], it defines and shapes the world around us. It dictates how we decide what is true, and how we take action on such truths. It is undeniable that the advent of superintelligent AI systems would irreversibly change how we relate to knowledge on both an individual and societal level.
MacAskill and Moorhouse refer to this as epistemic disruption in their paper “Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion”. When defining the intelligence explosion, they use the analogy of a compressed century. What if all the scientific, social, philosophical, and political advancements of the 21st century were compressed into just 10 years? MacAskill compares humanity's situation to:
"A mediaeval king suddenly needing to [...]
Outline:
(00:24) Introduction
(02:54) Could AI Really Help Solve This?
(06:36) More Drivers of Destabilisation
(07:54) The New Underclass of Those Who Do Not Wish to Enhance
(10:06) The World From a Normal Human's Perspective
(12:54) Preventing Epistemic Collapse
(14:48) Conclusion
(15:29) Acknowledgements
First published:
August 18th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YoGw4Hg5ndzaosmHL/beware-epistemic-collapse
Linkpost URL:
https://futuresonder.substack.com/p/beware-epistemic-collapse
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
What projects today could most improve a post-AGI world?
In “How to make the future better”, I lay out some areas I see as high-priority, beyond reducing risks from AI takeover and engineered pandemics.
These areas include:
- Preventing post-AGI autocracy
- Improving the governance of projects to build superintelligence
- Deep space governance
- Working on AI value-alignment; figuring out what character AI should have
- Developing a regime of AI rights
- Improving AI for reasoning, coordination and decision-making.
Here's an overview.
First, preventing post-AGI autocracy. Superintelligence structurally leads to concentration of power: post-AGI, human labour soon becomes worthless; those who can spend the most on inference-time compute have access to greater cognitive abilities than anyone else; and the military (and whole economy) can in principle be aligned to a single person.
The risk from AI-enabled coups in particular is detailed at length here. To reduce this risk, we can try to [...]
First published:
August 15th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rmjJPuziRk69esh3N/how-to-make-the-future-better-other-than-by-reducing
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Disclaimer: CEARCH itself does some work related to effective giving in Asia, and there is an inherent risk of bias to this evaluation. Beyond doing our best to remain impartial throughout the research process, we have also explicitly applied a meta discount for bias within our CEA, with the goal of eliminating any bias-driven over-estimation of the cause area's cost-effectiveness.
Key Takeaway: CEARCH recommends effective giving in Asia as a high impact philanthropic cause.
Introduction: CEARCH is a research and grantmaking organization – we try to find and fund highly cost-effective philanthropic ideas. The primary author for this report is Joel Tan, the Managing Director of CEARCH, and the lead researcher and grantmaker for its meta portfolio.
Note that this research investigation has been motivated by two considerations:
- Firstly, CEARCH and our grantmaking partners (e.g. individual members of the Meta Charity Funders) are interested in effective [...]
First published:
August 16th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cRSr3HSeoTHjpAuEi/intermediate-report-effective-giving-in-asia
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
About the Event
EA Summit: Santiago 2025 took place on July 19 at the Prince of Wales Country Club in Santiago, Chile. It was a one-day event focused on:
- Providing an accessible and low cost entry point to effective altruism for newcomers
- Fostering connections between local professionals. EA community and students
- Showcasing high-impact cause areas: AI safety, global health & development, animal welfare, social entrepreneurship, effective giving and biotechnology.
AFTERMOVIE: EA SUMMIT: SANTIAGO 2025
Key Stats
- Registered attendees: 133
- Attendees present: 87 (~66%)
- Volunteers: 15
- Speakers: 10
- Net budget: $17,000 USD
- Cost per attendee: $195 USD
- Likelihood to Recommend (LTR): 9.27 / 10
- Avg. new connections per attendee: 4.7
- Avg. meaningful connections per attendee: 2.4
- Attendees likely to apply for a short-term opportunity (<1 yr): 67%
- Rated event >3–10x better than counterfactual: 91%
- Felt welcomed: 4.95/5
- Respect score (others - women & gender minorities): 9.91-10/10
Our Aims
We intentionally aimed for a [...]
Outline:
(00:13) About the Event
(01:07) Key Stats
(02:10) Our Aims
(02:49) What Went Well
(02:53) ✅ High-quality content & speaker lineup
(05:09) ✅ Great energy, great people
(06:42) ✅ Professional feel, low cost, low time demand for organizers
(08:25) What Could Have Gone Better
(08:28) 🔸 No-show rate (~34%)
(09:42) 🔸 Catering confusion (vegan vs vegetarian)
(10:22) 🔸 Few 1-on-1s through the app
(11:12) 🔸 Timing mismatch with local norms
(11:33) Budget Snapshot
(11:48) Looking Ahead
First published:
August 15th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FjdFCxygusQghk5MH/ea-summit-santiago-2025-retrospective
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Summary
- 🤰🏽 A randomized study in Kenya found that giving families a $1,000 GiveDirectly cash transfer immediately cut infant deaths by 48%.
- 🏥 Deaths dropped most for mothers living near physician-staffed health facilities and those who received cash in the weeks before they gave birth.
- 🩺 GiveDirectly is launching a new program to maximize these life-saving impacts, partnering with a Kenyan community health provider to get cash to more expectant mothers.
In rural Kenya, giving poor families a one-time $1,000 transfer cut infant deaths nearly in half, one of the largest reductions ever recorded for a poverty program. With global aid budgets shrinking and funders under pressure to do more with less, the findings point to cash as a powerful, underused tool to reduce preventable deaths.
Cash cut infant deaths by 48%
The study, led by researchers at UC Berkeley and Oxford, tracked over 100,000 births and found [...]
Outline:
(01:03) Cash cut infant deaths by 48%
(02:13) Cash saved lives by helping new moms rest, eat, and deliver safely
(03:01) Cash had the largest impact when timed near birth and paired with access to healthcare
(04:04) Cash ranks among the best tools we have to save children's lives
(05:13) We're building on this evidence with new maternal and newborn health programs
(06:19) Cash is an underused tool to end preventable child deaths
(06:57) Appendix: How we know cash saved lives (Methods FAQs)
(07:04) Cash is well-studied. Why haven't we seen this impact before?
(07:56) Then how was this study able to measure the link between mortality and cash?
(09:13) How do they track 100,000 births with no hospital records?
First published:
August 18th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dNSXKsEqJAiZpTYBr/study-giving-cash-to-mothers-cut-infant-deaths-in-half
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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If you are an organization that:
- Has demonstrated initial success in a cost-effective global health intervention and has the potential and willingness to scale; and
- Is at an inflection point, has a demonstrated funding gap, and requires additional resources to optimize programming, equip for scale, or develop your track record to attract major funding…
Apply for funding today!
About this Funding Opportunity We are a group of donors looking to support cost-effective and high-impact global health nonprofits during a critical growth phase where targeted funding can have immense impact. For more information, including how to join as a funder, see the bottom of this post.
We will consider applications with total funding requests ranging from approximately $50,000-$300,000.
Grants will initially be one-off support, though renewals may be possible in some cases, at the discretion of individual donors. In this round, we expect around 2 million USD will be available [...]
Outline:
(00:47) About this Funding Opportunity
(01:39) Eligibility criteria:
(03:02) Selection criteria - What makes a competitive application?
(04:29) How to apply
(04:47) About the Global Health Funding Circle
First published:
August 15th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ynTFW43HPr7865kWS/request-for-proposals-global-health-funding-circle-fall-2025
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. We surveyed experts about the future of digital minds — computer systems capable of subjective experiences.
The survey explored a wide range of difficult and speculative questions: when digital minds will first be created, how quickly their collective welfare capacity will expand, what types of digital minds will emerge, where and by whom digital minds will be built, whether their net welfare will be positive or negative, what claims they will make about consciousness and rights, how society will respond—through protections, recognition, or resistance—and what the implications will be for AI safety.
The report begins with a concise summary of the main findings.
First published:
August 16th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hDf5WW7qzgq56d7wH/futures-with-digital-minds-expert-forecasts-in-2025
Linkpost URL:
https://digitalminds.report/forecasting-2025/
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Executive Summary
Aquatic animals—fish, shrimp, crabs, and other decapods—are the most numerous animals farmed for food, yet they receive just 11 % of global farmed animal welfare philanthropy (which is less than 0.5% of all global philanthropy). With 100 billion farmed fish and 440 billion farmed shrimp slaughtered every year, supporting high‑leverage interventions in this space offers one of the clearest opportunities to alleviate mass suffering at scale.
In 2025, Farmed Animal Funders (FAF) hosted the Aquatic Animal Funding Circle for major donors. After six months of co-learning, a request for proposals, co-evaluating, and co-funding, the funding circle members and aligned funders allocated funding to ten organizations. While not every funder funded every organization, FAF generally views these organizations as offering complementary tactics—corporate pressure, producer training, policy lock‑ins, and evidence generation—to form a coherent strategy for rapid, durable welfare gains.
FAF expects the recommended groups can absorb additional grants up to [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Executive Summary
(02:19) Why aquatic animals? Why now?
(03:42) Funding Recommendations
(03:46) Strategic Themes
(04:35) Recommended Organizations
(05:04) Measurable Outcomes
(05:38) Other Grants
(06:45) How to Fund
First published:
August 14th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dBwoeth8y9dQjTeSw/aquatic-animal-funding-recommendations
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Introducing the 'Unweirding Boards' Sequence
Over the past three months I’ve spoken with ~30 founders, board members, and staff at EA organisations, in an attempt to better understand what governance looks like within this community.
These conversations have taken the form of semi-structured interviews, exploring each individual's experience of governance. Most have started broad, answering something like "what is and isn't working?", before focusing on specific challenges or opportunities for improvement.
This isn't formal or representative research (I would very much like to speak with more people in general, and those at funders/fiscal sponsors/large organisations in particular!) but some clear patterns are emerging. I feel confident in beginning to share some initial reflections on the 'state of governance' in the EA community, and some suggestions for improving governance that will apply to many EA organisations.
With that in mind, this is post 1/n in an 'Unweirding Boards' [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Introducing the Unweirding Boards Sequence
(01:42) The State of Governance
(01:45) Setting up and maintaining a board is hard
(02:13) Getting clear on purpose
(02:39) Right-sizing time/effort spent on governance
(03:20) Clarifying decision-making
(03:38) Running effective meetings
(04:01) Appropriately engaging and getting support from board members
(04:36) Identifying board members
(04:57) When governance is good, its really good
(05:22) Leadership is held to account
(05:44) The organisation is held to account
(06:07) The organisation benefits from perspective and insight
(06:26) Leadership enjoys peace of mind
(06:47) Next Steps
(07:03) Getting More Perspectives
(07:36) Writing the Sequence
First published:
August 14th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hDiQCkfMivwysxegq/good-governance-unweirding-boards
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TL;DR: We've updated the EA Opportunities Board and migrated it over to effectivealtruism.org! 🙌
Check it out here* For organizations: submit opportunities to add to the board * For group organizers: request a Slack integration * For people interested in opportunities: sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter * For everyone else: give us feedback, and share the board with someone you know who could use it
Overview
The EA Opportunities Board is a website that lists accessible opportunities for building skills or contributing to impactful work. It includes things like internships, volunteer opportunities, part-time roles, training programs, funding opportunities — anything short of a full-time role.
Since the CEA Online Team took over the project at the start of 2025, we've been running it while attempting to minimize its costs. I'm now a bit more confident that it's worth our team making low-hanging-fruit improvements (for example, it did surprisingly well in the 2024 EA Survey given its relatively [...]
Outline:
(00:55) Overview
(02:42) Our plans
First published:
August 14th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rWBwBALyynn3qdfrh/we-ve-migrated-the-ea-opportunities-board-to
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I’m a long-time GiveWell donor and an ethical vegan. In a recent GiveWell podcast on livelihoods programs, providing animals as “productive assets” was mentioned as a possible program type. After reaching out to GiveWell directly to voice my objection, I was informed that because GiveWell's moral weights currently don’t include nonhuman animals, animal-based aid is not categorically off the table if it surpasses their cost-effectiveness bar.
Older posts on the GiveWell website similarly do not rule out animal donations from an ethical lens.
In response to some of the rationale GiveWell shared with me, I also want to proactively address a core ethical distinction:
- Animal-aid programs involve certain, programmatic harm to animals (breeding, confinement, separation of families, slaughter).
- Human-health programs like malaria prevention have, at most, indirect and uncertain effects on animal consumption (by saving human lives), which can change over time (e.g., cultural shifts, plant-based/cultivated options).
Constructive [...]
First published:
August 14th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YnL6prYQbaLz22mxe/psa-for-vegan-donors-givewell-not-ruling-out-animal-based
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Note: I work at MIRI, but not on the comms team. I don’t work on the book directly and am writing this post in my personal capacity, but do think it would be great if a lot of people read the book.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have written a book about why artificial superintelligence might cause human extinction. The book is called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. It is out September 16th and is available for preorder now.
The book is good
Having read it, I can say it's genuinely good. While I personally really enjoy Yudkowsky's other writing, I understand why some people find it off-putting or arrogant. I think If Anyone Builds It is much more accessible, it's measured and it doesn’t condescend to readers. It's also just an enjoyable (although also alarming) read.
This is by far the best explainer of existential risk from [...]
Outline:
(00:38) The book is good
(01:26) There have been impressive endorsements
(02:24) Preorders matter
First published:
August 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6WrbaWEfuMfqD9Kkh/consider-preordering-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies
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Giving What We Can has reached 10,000 🔸10% pledgers! We see this as an important milestone on the road to a cultural norm, and we’ve made a video to celebrate:
If you’re a 🔸10% or 🔹Trial pledger, we’d love for you to post about the 10k milestone on your social channels! You can find templates here.
And if you are a 🔸10% pledger, a sincere thank you for being part of the first 10,000! As our former executive director Luke Freeman wrote back in 2020:
“The world is made up of individual people who respond to social norms. What we do and say really matters, and it has flow-on effects on those around us, and to the rest of the world.”
You’re not only having an incredible impact by funding high-impact programs. You’re also paving the way for countless others.
Here's to a million and beyond!
First published:
August 13th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/etZtA3uzaKGaubkmp/a-big-milestone-10-000-10-pledgers
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We are pleased to announce that our new Executive Director, Attila Ujvari, has started work.
Up until now, CEEALAR has been led by Greg Colbourn, our Founder. Greg has been in the role of Executive Director in a part-time*, unpaid capacity from the start. Since being founded in 2018 as the EA Hotel, CEEALAR has grown into a grant-supported charity and increased in capacity by 70%, expanding to the adjoining building, and facing many trials and tribulations along the way. We have hosted hundreds of grantees, a significant number of whom have gone on to work at established organisations in the EA and AI Safety spaces; and hosted numerous events, unconferences, and retreats.
With the hiring of Attila, the role of Executive Director has become a paid, full-time position. Greg will remain Chair of the Trustees of CEEALAR.
Attila grew up in Hungary, spent 16 years in the [...]
First published:
August 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ah6rXHq8qqz7nNrFE/ceealar-has-a-new-executive-director
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The fact that the ITN framework[1] can help us prioritize between problems feels almost magical to me.
But when I see ITN BOTECs in the wild, I’m often very skeptical. It seems really easy for these estimates to be inadvertent “conclusion-laundering” — regurgitating the author's opinions in a quantitative or more robust-seeming form without actually providing any independent signal. And even when that's not the case, the bottom-line estimates can seem so noisy and ungrounded that I trust them less than my fuzzy, un-BOTECed intuitions.
So I'm[2] sharing notes on some pitfalls that seem especially pernicious and common to (i) help BOTEC authors avoid these issues, (ii) nudge readers to be somewhat cautious about deferring to such estimates, and (iii) encourage people to supplement (and/or to replace) ITN BOTECs with other approaches.
Note: I expect the post will make more sense to people who are already somewhat [...]
Outline:
(01:25) Brief outline of my views
(04:54) 1. Illusions of tractability
(05:17) a. Hard upper limits; our leverage may only cover a small fraction of the problem were hoping to solve
(08:10) b. The cause-stuffing pump -- or why the 100x heuristic can bias us towards wider (and/or vaguely defined) problem areas
(12:18) 2. Inflating neglectedness*importance
(12:24) a. Mismatched boundaries
(14:39) b. Other ways neglectedness gets exaggerated or skewed
(17:34) c. Using unrepresentative slices of total investment for comparisons of problems overall neglectedness
(19:37) 3. Edge cases & other issues with ITN
(20:54) 4. Precarious frameworks & the garbage-in, garbage-out effect
(23:35) Thanks!
First published:
August 13th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ECYrN8aY42KyQbPZe/itn-201-pitfalls-in-itn-botecs
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Crosspost of my blog post.
Factory farming is evil.
I know, I know, I’ve made this point before. I’ve described, in depth, the way we treat animals. I’ve described that we stuff billions of chickens into tiny cages where they can’t turn around or flap their wings—where their frail bones are broken three times on average over the course of their brief lives, where they inhale nothing but feces deposits from the caged birds above them.
I’ve described the results of a report which estimated that egg-laying hens spend about an hour a day in distress as intense as the most intense distress most humans ever experience. That they never see the sun except immediately before slaughter—that one of the most distressing things that can happen to a hen, being unable to perch, happens to nearly all the egg-laying hens in the world.
They live in filth [...]
First published:
August 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/roSnTrDssczawa5NE/the-bone-chilling-evil-of-factory-farming
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Is there anything we can do to make the longterm future go better other than preventing the risk of extinction?
My paper, Persistent Path-Dependence, addresses that question. I suggest there are a number of mechanisms that are fairly likely to be developed within our lifetimes that would result in extremely persistent path-dependent effects of predictable expected value. These include the creation of AGI-enforced institutions, a global concentration of power, the widespread settlement of space, the first immortal beings, the widespread design of new beings, and the ability to self-modify in significant and lasting ways.
I’m not very confident that such events will occur, but in my view they’re likely enough to make work to steer them in better directions very valuable. Let's take each mechanism in turn.
First, AGI-based institutions. Once we have AGI, decision-makers could:
- Set up an institution, and align the AGI so that it understands [...]
First published:
August 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/edpMbLKSqahoNxzgi/the-trajectory-of-the-future-could-soon-get-set-in-stone
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With Gather Town announcing a sharp price hike and removal of their free tier, I wanted to remind both organisations and remote-workers/students/anyone individually interested that the EA Gather is still available - and currently free for marginal use.[1]
Individuals
Just show up and start coworking :) The starting map is a shared space, so you can feel free to join anyone on there, even those in offices (orgs who want privacy have their offices on a different map). Use this invite link if you want private message and avatar permanence while you're there.
Organisations
The offer for a custom office from this post is still open. At the moment, we have space paid for 60 concurrent users, and we coordinate events by this calendar so that you can avoid overlaps. In the longer run I'm hoping orgs using the space will contribute an amount in proportion to their use [...]
Outline:
(00:25) Individuals
(00:47) Organisations
First published:
August 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gBrZWvWihehifHei2/virtual-offices-available-on-ea-gather-town
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We’re already in the second half of 2025 and there are still an incredible number of EAGx and Summit events coming up, as well as the first ever EA Global: New York City. We’re so excited to continue watching the EA community connect and grow.
Below is our conference schedule for the rest of the year. We’re supporting the first EAGx in Brazil, and inaugural EA conferences in France, Vietnam, New Zealand, and Turkey. We hope to reach more people than ever before. Please spread the word, especially for events happening near you!
We are also eager to initiate new events; if you’d like to apply to run an EAGx or Summit in 2026, please fill out this form!
Apply to run an EAGx or EA Summit in 2026 Upcoming EA conferences
EA Global
- EA Global: New York City (10–12 Oct) | Applications close September 28—apply now!
EAGx
[...]
Outline:
(01:02) Upcoming EA conferences
(01:06) EA Global
(01:18) EAGx
(02:00) EA Summits
(03:07) What is the difference between EA Global, EAGx, and EA Summits?
First published:
August 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hJWT3wJTFFTALub7d/upcoming-ea-conferences-in-2025
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Maybe my favorite quote ever is from a recent Scott Alexander article, but in order to explain it, I will have to provide some context.
Scott's recent piece, My Heart of Hearts, is broadly about why we should value ethical consistency. In it, he described his emotional reaction to the Gaza conflict in the following way:
A few months ago, I read an article by an aid worker in Gaza recounting the horrors he’d seen. Among a long litany, one stood out. A little kid came into the hospital with a backpack. The doctors told him he had to put it down so they could treat him, and he refused. The doctors insisted. The kid fought back. Finally someone opened the bag. It was some body part fragments from the kid's dead brother. He couldn’t bear to leave him, so he carried them everywhere he went.
I am a [...]
First published:
August 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gxKJqYF8SKNFHYFZn/a-million-is-made-out-of-a-million-ones
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Audio note: this article contains 69 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.
This is a link post. How long should you think about a problem that could determine the future of all existence? A mathematical journey from simple bets to existential risks.
Imagine a simple game. There's a jar full of pebbles, and you’re offered a bet. If you can estimate the number of pebbles to within 10%, you win $100,000. If you’re wrong, you lose $100,000. You have as much time as you want to think. How long should you spend? A day? A week? A year?
Now, imagine a much bigger game. You are part of a team that wants to start OpenAI. Your technology could be revolutionary, potentially ushering in an era of explosive economic growth and solving [...]
Outline:
(02:07) The Ground Rules: Our Simplified World
(04:10) Model 1: Is This Worth My Time?
(05:49) Model 2: The Cost of Delay
(08:20) Model 3: An Accelerating World
(14:18) Conclusion: The Humility of Models
First published:
August 9th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yP5og65WSPTXsJtov/with-the-future-of-the-world-in-your-hands-think-for-6-77
Linkpost URL:
https://impartial-priorities.org/p/with-the-future-of-the-world-in-your
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First off, every ethical argument for having children is dominated by other options that are more effective.
1) If you’re worried about population issues, just donate $10k to bednets. That's roughly the equivalent of two extra children existing in the world.
If you only care about population issues in your own country, then there are undoubtedly charities that save/create more lives in your own country that are cheaper than having your own children.
I would also recommend questioning your beliefs that people in your own country matter more than other countries.
2) If you’re worried about “idiocracies” and think your genes would make the difference, donate your sperm/eggs, and call it a day.
This also addresses the whole “you owe it to your ancestors” logic.
If you think you’d provide a better environment for the children than other people, remember that having children that feel like [...]
First published:
August 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mLjfAHwLef8dknK8e/having-children-is-a-deeply-personal-choice-do-not-use
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. This is a personal essay about my failed attempt to convince effective altruists to become socialists. I started as a convinced socialist who thought EA ignored the 'root causes' of poverty by focusing on charity instead of structural change. After studying sociology and economics to build a rigorous case for socialism, the project completely backfired as I realized my political beliefs were largely psychological coping mechanisms.
Here are the key points:
- Understanding the "root cause" of a problem doesn't necessarily lead to better solutions - Even if capitalism causes poverty, understanding "dynamics of capitalism" won't necessarily help you solve it
- Abstract sociological theories are mostly obscurantist bullshit - Academic sociology suffers from either unrealistic mathematical models or vague, unfalsifiable claims that don't help you understand or change the world
- The world is better understood as misaligned incentives rather than coordinated oppression - Most social [...]
First published:
August 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AcPw55oF3reBiW4FX/of-marx-and-moloch-how-my-attempt-to-convince-effective
Linkpost URL:
https://honestsignals.substack.com/p/of-marx-and-moloch-or-my-misguided
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
To what extent, in the future, will we get widespread, accurate, and motivational moral convergence - where future decision-makers avoid all major moral mistakes, are motivated to act to promote good outcomes, and are able to do so? And, even if we only get partial convergence, to what extent can we get to a near-best future by different groups, with very different moral views, coming together to compromise and trade?
In a new essay, Convergence and Compromise, Fin Moorhouse and I (Will) discuss these ideas.
Given “no easy eutopia”, we’re very unlikely to get to a near-best future by default. Instead, we’ll need people to try really hard to bring it about: very proactively trying to figure out what's morally best - even if initially counterintuitive or strange - and trying to make that happen.
So: how likely is that to happen?
Convergence
First: maybe, in the future, most [...]
Outline:
(01:06) Convergence
(05:35) Compromise
First published:
August 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qdcRfuqSfBBYJu6bx/will-morally-motivated-actors-steer-us-towards-a-near-best
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This is a link post. (I wrote this quickly for my own edification. It isn't original thinking; it condenses takes I’ve read on X over the past few days. Where relevant I’ve linked tweets. I hope it's helpful for people.)
Watching an OpenAI launch now feels like watching an Apple keynote in the early 2010s. As a kid, I was giddy about which new, unaffordable iPhone would drop. I’ll probably look back on my twenties as the years I felt the same mix of excitement and perhaps fear about whatever OpenAI released next.
At first glance on X, before I had access to the model, the mood was mostly disappointment. Some people pushed their timelines out; a few even talked about the end of the pre-training paradigm. The live presentation had a couple of funny slip-ups.
I’m not a technical person, and my naive expectation was that GPT-5 would feel [...]
First published:
August 9th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/m8H2QooDJzGaTDXYK/notes-and-updates-on-gpt-5
Linkpost URL:
https://robertgaurav.xyz/notes/gpt5
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Images from the article:
gpt-3 -> gpt-4 were all ~100x scaleups in pretraining compute. gpt-5 is not. building projects like stargate and colossus2 to actually 100x gpt-4 compute takes time, let the labs cook :)". The tweet offers a perspective on AI model development, suggesting that while previous GPT models saw significant computational increases, GPT-5 development may require more patience as larger projects are being built." style="max-width: 100%;" />
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This past June, we hosted EA Global: London 2025. This was my second EAG as Program Lead and one that ended up feeling like a real milestone for the project. I’ve been reflecting on why that was, and so I wanted to share a few thoughts on what stood out to me, what we’re proud of, and what we’re doing next.
The best EAG yet (by the numbers)
This was our largest EAG to date, with 1,596 people in attendance. It was also our best-performing EAG based on two other important metrics: net cost-per-attendee and likelihood to recommend. To provide a few more details:
- Attendance: We saw a 12% increase from last year's EAG London! This was our largest EAG ever and (probably) the largest in-person gathering of EAs, ever.
- Net cost-per-attendee: The net cost-per-attendee was around $850 USD. This means EA Global: London 2025 was the [...]
Outline:
(00:32) The best EAG yet (by the numbers)
(02:02) The vibes were very good
(03:31) A few more things I was excited about
(04:46) What's next?
First published:
August 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6ytWGP2MBoym6qs6S/a-reflection-on-ea-global-london-2025
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TLDR
- Group Support Grants are back, with payout processing[1] from 11th August!
- Rapid Group Funding is merging into Group Support Grants (but you can still request fast-track processing)
- Apply here!
We are delighted to announce that Group Support Grant payouts are resuming from 11th August 2025. This follows our previous announcement that payouts would be paused during June and July.
We’re welcoming all EA groups[2] - regardless of type, size or location - to apply now! Historically, we think too few groups have applied.
About Group Support Grants CEA provides grants to university and local groups because we believe groups are a crucial way to grow and nurture the EA community. Grant funding helps groups thrive by enabling organisers to run more and better quality activities, and ultimately inspire more people to aim to do as much good as they can with their careers.
[...]
Outline:
(00:52) About Group Support Grants
(01:58) If you've already applied for Group Support Funding
(02:26) Important Change to Rapid Group Funding
First published:
August 7th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n8gatKB4i7zhaiH4f/apply-now-group-support-grants-are-back
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Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Why ending the worst abuses of factory farming is an issue ripe for moral reform
I recently joined Dwarkesh Patel's podcast to discuss factory farming. I hope you’ll give it a listen — and consider supporting his fundraiser for FarmKind's Impact Fund. (Dwarkesh is matching all donations up to $250K; use the code “dwarkesh”.)
We discuss two contradictory views about factory farming that produce the same conclusion: that its end is either inevitable or impossible.
Some techno-optimists assume factory farming will vanish in the wake of AGI. Some pessimists see reforming it as a hopeless cause. Both camps arrive at the same conclusion: fatalism. If factory farming is destined to end, or persist, then what's [...]
First published:
August 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HiGmRwq4YiDzggRLH/not-inevitable-not-impossible
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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TL;DR: If a (meta) org had a meaningful impact on you (in line with what they hope to achieve), you should probably tell them. It is essential for their impact reporting, which is essential for them to continue operating. You are likely underestimating just how valuable your story is to them. It could be thousands of dollars worth.
Thanks to Toby Tremlett, Lauren Mee and Sofia Balderson for reviewing a draft version of this post. All mistakes are my own.
- Many organisations shaped my career — yet I usually only shared my story when prompted. In reflecting on my career journey, I was reminded of all the organizations who led me to where I am. I believe I reported their counterfactual contribution back to them, but this was not usually by my own doing. In two cases, I was personally reached out to - in one case, I [...]
First published:
August 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3v6kghxMttEhbK3dT/consider-thanking-whoever-helped-you
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a summary of the new paper “No Easy Eutopia”, here.
How easy is it to get to a future that's pretty close to ideal?
You could think of reaching eutopia as like an expedition to sail to an uninhabited island. The expedition is more likely to reach the island to the extent that:
- The island is bigger, more visible, and closer to the point of departure;
- The ship's navigation systems work well, and are aimed toward the island;
- The ship's crew can send out smaller reconnaissance boats, and not everyone onboard the ship needs to reach the island for the expedition to succeed.
Similarly, we could be on track for a near-best future for a few different reasons.
First, eutopian futures could present a big target: that is, society would end up reaching a near-best outcome across a wide variety of possible futures, even without [...]
Outline:
(03:49) Future moral catastrophe
(07:56) How maximum achievable value varies with total resources
First published:
August 6th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rv5DAeDLsJ27xsQNB/how-hard-to-achieve-is-eutopia
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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It's time once again for our annual EA Forum user survey! :) Thank you to everyone who filled it in last year — those results were especially helpful for developing our current Forum strategy.
From today through August 20[1], we’re running an updated version of the survey for 2025. All questions are optional, as is a section at the end about other CEA programs.
We estimate the survey will take you 10-20 minutes to complete[2] (less if you skip questions, longer if you write particularly detailed answers). Your answers will be saved in your browser, so you can pause and return to it later.
Take the survey We appreciate you taking the time to fill out the survey, and we read every response.
If you haven’t used the Forum in the past 12 months, you’ll see a significantly shorter survey, and your input on other CEA programs is still useful.
[...]
First published:
August 6th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mYzKGg69GRdncxGGb/take-the-2025-ea-forum-user-survey
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“The Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, it's redistributive, it's an extremely great philanthropist, as an effective altruist, all of those kinds of things.” - Peter Thiel
Effective altruism has more than its share of critics. But Peter Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, is unusual in that, when he describes us as the “Antichrist,” he does not mean this as a generic slur but rather as a specific claim that we oppose Jesus Christ in the Second Coming.
This document is intended just as an explication of his views, I neither endorse nor critique them. My attempted summary of his argument:
- The Antichrist will claim to bring peace and safety while actually creating a stagnant global state.
- The only promising technology for avoiding stagnation is AI.
- So the Antichrist will try to slow down and regulate AI in the name of peace and safety.
- [...]
Outline:
(02:44) Background: Girardian Mimetic Desires and Scapegoating
(03:05) Scott Alexander's Summary
(09:50) Key Points
(10:40) Background on the Antichrist
(11:51) Thiel's Views
(11:54) Stagnation
(14:20) Totalitarianism
(15:57) The Antichrist
(17:27) Summary
(17:57) FAQs
(18:09) Is Thiel unaware of the dangers of AI?
(19:31) How would his opinions change if he thought AI was more powerful?
(20:42) Why doesn't Thiel think AI will be that transformative?
(21:40) If Thiel is worried about totalitarianism, is he also worried that AI could enable totalitarianism?
(22:42) I work in AI safety. What does Thiel think I should do?
(23:01) Im not Christian. Is there anything that I should be learning from Thiels views?
(24:26) How mainstream is Peter Thiels interpretation of the Bible?
First published:
August 6th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hGwAohPbwCrDT5ynY/ea-as-antichrist-understanding-peter-thiel
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. TL;DR
Calibrating your ambition is a skill. Overshooting can lead to burnout; undershooting can mean missed opportunities. The sweet spot lies in setting goals that stretch you and suit your current context. Use tools like assessing your starting point, clarifying your “why,” zooming out on your timeline, and recalibrating with curiosity. You probably won’t get it exactly right—but that's the point. Calibration is practice, not a one-time decision.
Acknowledgements: Thanks a lot to Kevin Xia for providing valuable structural feedback and my husband, Chris Balderson, for helping me review and publish this post.
Why I wrote this post
Have you or someone you know burnt out after spending a year chasing a dream impact-focused job?
Or maybe you or your friend is someone brilliant—capable of so much—but who seems to be playing it small?
Many of us swing between overambition and underambition. Neither is great. [...]
Outline:
(00:56) Why I wrote this post
(02:03) My story
(02:06) Overshooting
(04:21) Undershooting
(07:19) Why we get ambition wrong (in both directions)
(08:57) Tool #1: The Where Am I Really? Inventory
(12:01) Tool #2: The Why Do I Want This? Filter
(12:46) Tool #3: Zooming Out on Your Timeline
(14:19) Tool #4: Keep Calibrating with Curiosity
(15:14) Tool #5: When In Doubt, Overshoot (Mindfully)
(17:22) Putting It Together: An Example Using All 5 Tools
(20:46) How to manage the day-to-day
(22:02) Conclusion
(22:44) Id love to hear from you
First published:
August 5th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n9qJZnH3JNCNCfHxb/calibrating-your-ambition-knowing-when-to-dream-big-and-when
Linkpost URL:
https://notingthemargin.substack.com/p/calibrating-your-ambition-knowing
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. The Open Wing Alliance 2025 cage-free fulfillment report shows that 92% of cage-free egg commitments with deadlines of 2024 or earlier have been fulfilled, up from 89% last year. The report details a regional breakdown of progress around the world.
Thanks to OWA groups and others for continuing to hold companies around the world accountable for their commitments.
First published:
August 5th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HwXBSEgaXvyhLixxL/as-of-july-2025-92-of-cage-free-egg-commitments-with
Linkpost URL:
https://openwingalliance.org/2025-cage-free-fulfillment-report
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This morning I was looking into Switzerland's new animal welfare labelling law. I was going through the list of abuses that are now required to be documented on labels, and one of them made me do a double-take: "Frogs: Leg removal without anaesthesia."
This confused me. Why are we talking about anaesthesia? Shouldn't the frogs be dead before having their legs removed? It turns out the answer is no; standard industry practice is to cut their legs off while they are fully conscious. They remain alive and responsive for up to 15 minutes afterward. As far as I can tell, there are zero welfare regulations in any major producing country.
The scientific evidence for frog sentience is robust - they have nociceptors, opioid receptors, demonstrate pain avoidance learning, and show cognitive abilities including spatial mapping and rule-based learning.
It's hard to find data on the scale of [...]
First published:
August 5th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wCcWyqyvYgF3ozNnS/frog-welfare
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve reopened applications for the following Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program Cohorts:
- February 9th - April 5th 2026
- August - September 2026 (exact dates TBD)
This post summarises the six new charity ideas recommended for the February 2026 Cohort (which can also be read and shared as a standalone post here).
Applications close on September 21st. For the full application timeline and program details, visit our website.
Apply now Why should you apply to the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program?
If you’re an ambitious, impact-driven individual looking to start a high-impact nonprofit, the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program is your best launchpad.
Since 2018, we have incubated over 50 field-leading, benchmark-setting charities across different cause areas who have raised $68+ million and are supported by actors like GiveWell, Founders Pledge, Mulago, Open Philanthropy, Animal Charity Evaluators. We disbursed $3.6M in seed grants, and many of [...]
Outline:
(01:00) Why should you apply to the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program?
(02:10) Introducing our newest recommended ideas
(04:01) Air quality monitoring & transparency meta-charity
(05:03) Training to improve the energy efficiency of brick kilns
(06:00) Boosting access to asset-collateralized loans for small-scale farms
(06:54) Targeted Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Mobile Health Interventions
(07:46) Working with large food retailers to achieve plant-based-protein sale commitments
(08:24) Securing scale-up funding for the alternative protein industry
(09:14) Cage-free Farming in the Middle East
(10:30) Reducing Keel Bone Fractures
(11:40) Apply to our program to help launch these organizations
First published:
August 4th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4uTpbdaTGLpwTpmpR/application-for-the-2026-charity-entrepreneurship-programs
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Hi all!
The Spring 2025 round of the Mental Health Funding Circle went well, and we're thrilled to be supporting seven organisations we believe are doing evidence-informed and deeply impactful work across global mental health and wellbeing. This round saw $731,000 committed by participating funders.
We had many more strong applications than we were able to fund. The shortlist reflects tricky decisions among a pool of fantastic candidates, many of whom we hope to support in future rounds.
Here's who received grants this round:
- Action for Happiness – $64,000 to expand their digital programme, public campaigns and educational content promoting mental wellbeing in the UK.
- ACTRA – $105,000 to scale cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)‑based group programmes and empower at‑risk youth in Colombia.
- Finemind – $100,000 to deliver community-led therapy in Uganda using trained lay health workers.
- Happier Lives Institute – $200,000 to continue their work to [...]
First published:
August 4th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h6iRWEXBw5ymuTHvu/mhfc-spring-update
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Today, Forethought and I are releasing an essay series called Better Futures, here.[1] It's been something like eight years in the making, so I’m pretty happy it's finally out! It asks: when looking to the future, should we focus on surviving, or on flourishing?
In practice at least, future-oriented altruists tend to focus on ensuring we survive (or are not permanently disempowered by some valueless AIs). But maybe we should focus on future flourishing, instead.
Why?
Well, even if we survive, we probably just get a future that's a small fraction as good as it could have been. We could, instead, try to help guide society to be on track to a truly wonderful future.
That is, I think there's more at stake when it comes to flourishing than when it comes to survival. So maybe that should be our main focus.
The whole essay series [...]
First published:
August 4th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mzT2ZQGNce8AywAx3/should-we-aim-for-flourishing-over-mere-survival-the-better
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Summary
- Countries
- The USA (34.4%) and the UK (13.5%) remain the countries with the largest proportions of EA respondents. We observed that 32% of respondents came from Europe (excluding the UK), while 20% came from the rest of the world. In previous years, we observed a decline in the percentage of respondents from these countries. This trend seems like it might have decreased or plateaued since 2022.
- This year, for the first time, we looked at EAs’ countries of origin as well as their current countries of residence. In absolute terms, we see large flows into the USA and UK, but Switzerland shows by far the highest relative level of in-flows, with 62% of respondents having a different country of origin.
- Cities
- This year, London was the city with the most respondents (6.7%), followed by the SF Bay Area (5.7%), DC (3.8%) and NYC (3.3%). Interestingly [...]
Outline:
(00:12) Summary
(02:59) Totals per country
(04:22) Changes over time
(04:48) Movement between countries
(06:18) Totals per city
(08:15) Gender
(09:19) Race
(12:07) Age and time in the EA community
(15:15) Student status
(16:18) Engagement
(18:02) Satisfaction
(19:22) Cause Prioritization
(21:37) EA Group Membership
(23:49) Further research
First published:
August 4th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fpn6MZTShaGLZqopo/ea-survey-2024-geography
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Imagine waking up tomorrow in a world very different from our own. There is no society, nor do you have any friends or acquaintances. You must fend for yourself, acquiring your own food. Disease runs rampant. The world is filled with monsters that are trying to kill and eat you, often slowly over the course of many minutes. You’re constantly hungry, thirsty, and in discomfort from temperature extremes. Then, after about a week of this brutal existence, you die painfully—from starvation, being eaten alive, disease, thirst, or being crushed to death.
Question: was your life worth living?
Obvious answer: no!
But this is the life that nearly every conscious animal on Earth will ever experience. For every human alive today, there are hundreds of millions of creatures consigned to this brief, brutal, and hellish existence. This is the life of nearly every animal, and it's why I’m generally in [...]
First published:
August 1st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8GaxX4TofwxF2gh5M/most-animals-have-bad-lives
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a cross post written by Andy Masley, not me. I found it really interesting and wanted to see what EAs thought of his arguments.
This post was inspired by similar posts by Tyler Cowen and Fergus McCullough. My argument is that while most drinkers are unlikely to be harmed by alcohol, alcohol is drastically harming so many people that we should denormalize alcohol and avoid funding the alcohol industry, and the best way to do that is to stop drinking.
This post is not meant to be an objective cost-benefit analysis of alcohol. I may be missing hard-to-measure benefits of alcohol for individuals and societies. My goal here is to highlight specific blindspots a lot of people have to the negative impacts of alcohol, which personally convinced me to stop drinking, but I do not want to imply that this is a fully objective analysis. It [...]
Outline:
(02:31) Alcohol is a much bigger problem than you may think
(06:59) Why you should stop drinking even if alcohol will not harm you personally
(14:41) Conclusion
First published:
August 3rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dnbpKkjnw3v6JkaDa/alcohol-is-so-bad-for-society-that-you-should-probably-stop
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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AI is advancing incredibly fast. We might see AI systems that are better than most humans at many tasks within a few years. This would change things drastically for animals in factory farms, in the wild, and beyond… and therefore animal advocates’ strategies should change, too.
In this post, I argue:
- Based on recent trends in AI capabilities and advances in training techniques, truly transformative AI could arrive soon, e.g. by 2030.
- This matters for animal advocates (if you agree it could arrive soon), because transformative AI will change the game for animals—for better or worse.
- Animal advocates might reasonably:
- Optimise harder for immediate results (not results in e.g. 5+ years’ time)
- Predict how AI will change things, and try to make that go well for animals
- Try to increase the concern that AIs or their controllers show for animals
- Focus on building capacity to prepare for TAI
- Shift to AI welfare, to [...]
Outline:
(02:14) Transformative AI may arrive soon
(04:32) This matters for animals and their advocates
(05:45) How might animal advocates respond to TAI soon?
(05:52) Stick to business as usual
(06:55) Optimise harder for immediate results
(08:30) Predict how AI will change things, and try to make that go well for animals
(10:38) Focus on building capacity to prepare for TAI
(12:04) Try to increase the concern that AIs or their controllers show for animals
(13:28) Shift to AI welfare, to protect potential sentient AIs from suffering
(14:25) Shift towards all-inclusive AI safety
(15:40) You can do something about this
First published:
August 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TY2f2Ts2EdsDAP35y/animal-advocates-should-respond-to-transformative-ai-maybe
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Below some meta-level / operational / fundraising thoughts around producing the SB-1047 Documentary I've just posted on Manifund (see previous Lesswrong / EAF posts on AI Governance lessons learned).
The SB-1047 Documentary took 27 weeks and $157k instead of my planned 6 weeks and $55k. Here's what I learned about documentary production
Total funding received: ~$143k ($119k from this grant, $4k from Ryan Kidd's regrant on another project, and $20k from the Future of Life Institute).
Total money spent: $157k
In terms of timeline, here is the rough breakdown month-per-month:
- Sep / October (production): Filming of the Documentary. Manifund project is created.
- November (rough cut): I work with one editor to go through our entire footage and get a first rough cut of the documentary that was presented at The Curve.
- December-January (final cut - one editor): I interview multiple potential editors that [...]
Outline:
(03:19) But why did the project end up taking 27 weeks instead of 6 weeks?
(03:25) Short answer
(06:22) Impact
(07:14) What I would do differently next-time
First published:
August 1st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cFLuvK6g8AikifmwH/sb-1047-documentary-the-post-mortem-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Summary
- 💸 We’ve sent nearly $1b to people in poverty — next up: $5b by 2035 through smarter, faster, recipient-first programs in our mission to accelerate the end of extreme poverty.
- 🛠️ From cash for new moms to planning nudges and AI tools, we’re piloting designs that could have much more impact per dollar and be scaled by governments.
- 🎯 We continue to hold new innovations to a high bar: they must be respectful, scalable, and more impactful than our standard program.
- 🚀 We’re seeking another $25m to accelerate our innovative pilots and have even more room for funding for our ever-improving flagship Poverty Relief programs.
This year, GiveDirectly will hit a milestone: $1 billion committed to people in poverty, alongside 25+ independent studies rigorously testing how that cash was spent, what changed, and why.
Now we’re raising the bar. GiveDirectly has set an audacious new goal [...]
Outline:
(03:06) ✅ What we're still doing: Scaling what works
(06:10) 🆕 What we're starting: Designing for higher impact per dollar
(09:40) Our next billion dollars will be even more impactful
First published:
July 31st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tozHtFLGMDhizFs5d/from-proven-to-fit-for-purpose-what-givedirectly-s-doing
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Tom will answer the questions in the comments between 7 and 9 pm UK time on August 6th.
Tom Ough is a Senior Editor at UnHerd, co-host of the Anglofuturism podcast, and the author of a new book, ‘The Anti-Catastrophe League’. For the last few years, he has been writing in a range of publications about global catastrophic risks, and (sometimes relatedly) how Britain can prosper by adopting new technologies. Previously, he worked as a journalist at The Telegraph, where he wrote for nearly seven years.
You can see more of his articles on his website, and a few of his most EA-flavoured pieces below:
- Earth scientists are playing with fire: Can the climate be re-engineered?
- Could AI make the next pandemic deadlier?
- Watt lies beneath: geothermal energy
Recently, Tom published The Anti-Catastrophe League, a book profiling the individuals and organisations working to reduce global catastrophic risks. For [...]
Outline:
(01:23) The Anti-Catastrophe League
(06:30) What might you ask Tom?
First published:
July 31st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/s2T6dSXuFAwsLtShC/ama-tom-ough-senior-editor-at-unherd-author-of-the-anti
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Abstract
This post explores how emerging economic systems could lock in harmful defaults for animals and outlines a research agenda to identify opportunities and begin the groundwork for embedding animal welfare into future frameworks before it's too late.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Ian Andrews, Kevin Xia and Andrew McCallum for thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this post. All mistakes are my own.
TL;DR
- Our economic system commodifies ~ 1.6 trillion animals annually.
- This system is being destabilised by many factors including AI, climate breakdown, inequality and institutional decay.
- These disruptions create rare openings to reshape foundational values.
- Industrial capitalism embedded speciesism at scale, new systems could do the same.
- This post outlines a neglected research agenda exploring how to integrate animal welfare into emerging economic frameworks before lock-in occurs.
- It suggests initial directions (such as integrating animal welfare into post-growth metrics and AI governance) and invites feedback [...]
Outline:
(00:12) Abstract
(00:40) TL;DR
(01:31) Introduction: why I'm writing this now
(02:12) Why economic paradigms matter for animals
(03:04) We need to hedge across plausible futures
(03:44) The logic of lock in: lessons from AI policy
(05:33) A new research space: animal welfare meets economic transition
(06:30) Avoiding false choices: long-term strategy, not a substitute
(07:40) Why now: a critical window for foundational change
(09:38) How current systems entrench suffering
(12:08) From reaction to prevention: what transition periods make possible
(13:53) A research agenda: preventing future harm
(14:13) Research aims
(15:37) Strategic actions
(17:22) Mapping future systems: three paradigms, three risks
(19:32) Case study: degrowth and animal invisibility
(20:15) Conclusion: Steering the future before its set
First published:
July 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yKx4JskGWc9noAtqW/preventing-animal-suffering-lock-in-why-economic-transitions
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a post about my impact-focused career journey, with a few tentative lessons drawn out:
- Unofficial work gets you hired
- Even if an organisation has a need, they don’t always advertise it
- You can create your own roles
More on those below. But first, some context.
I’m Jamie Harris, the Courses Project Lead at The Centre for Effective Altruism, where I lead a team running online programs that inspire and empower talented people to explore the best ways they can help others. That's my full-time role.
I also have two extremely part-time/spare-time commitments. I’m a Fund Manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund, which aims to increase the impact of projects using the principles of effective altruism by improving their access to talent, capital, and knowledge. And I’m President of Leaf, a nonprofit that supports exceptional teenagers in exploring how they can best save lives, help others [...]
First published:
July 26th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c6mPrJpbnPm4LhwRi/a-deep-dive-case-study-of-an-impact-focused-career
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
With all the current interest in finding and landing impactful roles, we’re excited to share a significantly revised version of our career guide!
Spanning 8 chapters, it covers topics like matching your motivations to good opportunities, developing your career hypotheses, applying in a way that maximizes your odds of success, and diagnosing and overcoming obstacles in the job hunt. It's meant to help people at all stages, whether you’re unsure what your path to impact should be or you have a pretty good idea but need help pursuing it (including if you keep getting rejected and aren’t sure what to do).
If you’re interested, you can sign up to get a summarized version of the guide delivered in chunks via email, and/or apply for 1:1 advising to talk with an advisor about your situation.
We’d also love to hear what you think about this guide (or any of our [...]
First published:
July 29th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jqomhaK8Anv7TBPcv/new-guide-for-people-interested-in-impactful-careers
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Highlights I enjoyed Career Conversations Week, and I’m thankful to all who took part. There were so many great posts that many of them are under-read/ under-rated. So I’d highly recommend reading a random post from the tag, and adding (or subtracting) karma.
I particularly enjoyed:
- My colleague Rika's 6 years of building an EA-aligned career from an LMIC. As Geoffrey points out in a comment, the concrete details here make the post practically useful as well as motivational.
- Annika Burman's Why You Should Build Your Own EA Internship Abroad. The post is well-written and interesting, and I hope it inspires some readers to create their own internships (abroad or not).
- The comments on the debate I posted, Debate: Are enough EAs earning to give? - especially Calebp's comment, where he bravely articulates the first ‘disagree’ take on a particularly lop-sided poll.
- The entire Ask Career Advisors Anything [...]
Outline:
(00:12) Highlights
(01:37) Retrospective
(02:39) How did the week affect Forum growth?
(04:26) Other metrics
(05:16) Work and costs
(05:54) Did you find this event valuable?
First published:
July 29th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YJZSfxBpyvPtKA3G5/career-conversations-highlights-and-retrospective
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Confidence Level: I’ve been an organizer at UChicago for over a year now with my co-organizer, Avik. I also started the UChicago Rationality Group, co-organized a 50-person Midwest EA Retreat, and have spoken to many EA organizers from other universities. A lot of this post is based on vibes and conversations with other organizers, so while it's grounded in experience, some parts are more speculative than others. I’ll try to flag the more speculative points when I can (the * indicates points that I’m less certain about).
I think it's really important to make sure that EA principles persist in the future. To give one framing for why I believe this: if you think EA is likely to significantly reduce the chances of existential risks, you should think that losing EA is itself a factor significantly contributing to existential risks.
Therefore, I also think one of the [...]
Outline:
(01:12) Impact Through Force Multiplication
(04:19) Individual Benefits
(04:23) Personal Impact
(06:27) Professional
(07:34) Social
(08:10) Counters
First published:
July 29th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3aPCKsHdJqwKo2Dmt/why-you-should-become-a-university-group-organizer
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
About this Funding Opportunity
We are a group of donors looking to support cost-effective and high-impact farmed animal welfare and protection nonprofits, particularly during a critical growth phase where targeted funding can have a significant impact. Twice a year, we grant a total of ±$500k divided among the most promising applicants, with a typical grant size of $50k.
Grants will initially be one-off support, though renewals may be possible in some cases at the discretion of individual donors. We aim to keep the application process relatively short and fast, reflecting the smaller and sometimes time-sensitive grants.
See the results from our first two rounds here. More info about SAFC and how you can join at the bottom of this post.
➡️ Apply here by August 25th.
Eligibility Criteria:
- The intervention is focused on reducing the suffering of farmed or wild animals or on reducing the number of [...]
Outline:
(00:15) About this Funding Opportunity
(01:07) Eligibility Criteria:
(02:06) Areas we funded in our last rounds
(02:48) Areas we are open to funding
(03:10) Areas we are not considering this round
(03:29) Application & Timeline
(04:01) Selection Criteria - What makes a competitive application?
(05:36) Future Rounds
(05:47) About the Strategic Animal Funding Circle
(06:43) Join us and support impactful animal welfare charities!
First published:
July 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AhPwptBxNeZxaCjfK/request-for-proposals-strategic-animal-funding-circle-fall
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
People often tell me that they wish they had more insight into what I actually do in my role on the Community Health team. I’ve finally gotten around to writing something thanks to @Dion🔸 , who has been asking me for quite a while to write about what I do, and emphasising that this is something people would be interested in reading. I also sit opposite @Toby Tremlett🔹 who's running career conversations week – thanks for the encouragement to write this, Toby.
People often seem to write these when they’re hiring. To clarify, we don’t currently have an open hiring round, but you can express interest on CEA's form here.
What am I aiming to do with my job, and why? I’m a Community Liaison on the Community Health team at CEA. The Community Health team aims to strengthen the effective altruism community's ability to fulfil its potential [...]
Outline:
(00:47) What am I aiming to do with my job, and why?
(02:44) So what do I do?
(03:19) What I've worked on in the last ~7ish days
(06:43) What's brilliant about my job?
(09:40) What's difficult?
(12:09) Some closing thoughts
First published:
July 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qx3LiK8qpMt8cgmbp/writing-about-my-job-community-liaison
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I donate money each month. The money is gone. The end.
While this is essentially what the 10% Pledge boils down to, it's been a surprisingly intense and exciting journey psychologically. As I just had my first anniversary, it seemed appropriate to think back and re-evaluate. I always love reading about the experiences of other pledgers, so I thought I might as well share some of my thoughts.
The Pledge's Influence
It's hard to admit, but: I am not a generous person, especially not with my time. You would never see me volunteering at a soup kitchen. I don't offer help or proactively engage with people on the street that seem to be struggling. Altruism never had much relevance in my life, nor is it ever a topic in my interactions with people. A chain of independent events led me to donate some amount of my income several years [...]
Outline:
(00:37) The Pledges Influence
(02:00) Spoilt for Choice - Where to Donate?
(03:49) Never Doing Enough
(05:26) The Ivory Tower
(06:13) Being Vocal
(06:56) Conclusion
First published:
July 27th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yPkjMCp4uxXkDQxva/my-first-pledge-anniversary-thoughts-of-an-average-joe
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TLDR: A story from Childhood, to Medicine, to Effective Altrusim, to managing our Non-Profit OneDay Health
I don’t think I can add much to the incredible career advice from this week, so, I thought it might be interesting to tell the story of how my "career"[1], I ended up shaped by Effective Altruism, even when I only read “the book” at age 30. Maybe some of you will resonate with some of it.
Not AI - my actual roof
I sometimes wake up as the morning peeks into our hut and stare at the most beautiful roof we will call our own - and pinch myself. Like Denkenberger said “As you reflect on your blessings, consider your job among them. And perhaps let that gratitude inspire….”
Middle class ‘Bliss’
My youth was middle-class suburbia at its mostly best. Incredible parents who gave me more opportunities [...]
Outline:
(01:52) Waking up
(02:52) EA from the inside out
(05:12) OneDay Health - from Tiny to Bigger
(06:47) Career/Vocation thoughts/ideas
First published:
July 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/erqX92pgFoPdtXLgu/providence-or-fate-i-sometimes-pinch-mysel
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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And other ways to make event content more valuable.
I organise and attend a lot of conferences, so the below is correct and need not be caveated based on my experience, but I could be missing some angles here.
When you imagine a session at an event going wrong, you’re probably thinking of the hapless, unlucky speaker. Maybe their slides broke, they forgot their lines, or they tripped on a cable and took the whole stage backdrop down.
This happens sometimes, but event organizers usually remember to invest the effort required to prevent this from happening (e.g., checking that the slides work, not leaving cables lying on the stage).
But there's another big way that sessions go wrong that is sorely neglected: wasting everyone's time, often without people noticing.
Let's give talks a break. They often suck, but event organizers are mostly doing the right things to make them [...]
Outline:
(01:11) Panels
(03:40) The group brainstorm
(04:27) Your session attendees do not have the answers.
(05:26) Ideas are easy. Bandwidth is low.
(06:28) The ideas are not worth the time cost.
(07:50) Choosing more valuable content: fidelity per person-minute
First published:
July 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LaMDxRqEo8sZnoBXf/please-no-more-group-brainstorming
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is Part 1 of a multi-part series, shared as part of Career Conversations Week. The views expressed here are my own and don't reflect those of my employer.
TL;DR:
Building an EA-aligned career starting from an LMIC comes with specific challenges that shaped how I think about career planning, especially around constraints:
- Everyone has their own "passport"—some structural limitation that affects their career more than their abilities. Reframing these from unfair barriers to data about my specific career path has helped me a lot.
- When pursuing an ideal career path, it's easy to fixate on what should be possible rather than what actually is. But those idealized paths often require circumstances you don't have—whether personal (e.g., visa status, financial safety net) or external (e.g., your dream org hiring, or a stable funding landscape). It might be helpful to view the paths that work within your actual constraints [...]
Outline:
(00:21) TL;DR:
(01:27) Introduction
(02:25) My EA journey so far
(03:18) Sometimes my passport mattered more than my competencies, and thats okay
(04:43) Everyone has their own passport
(06:19) Realistic opportunities often outweigh idealistic ones
(08:04) Importance of a fail-safe
(08:37) Playing the long game
(09:44) Adversity quotient seems underrated
(10:13) Building resilience through adversity
(11:22) Pivot into recruiting
(12:11) Building AQ over time
(14:02) Why AQ matters in EA-aligned work
(15:01) Closing thoughts
First published:
July 28th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Hh839MaiWCPzyB3M/building-an-ea-aligned-career-from-an-lmic
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Warning: Discussions of extreme pain and suffering.
In the US, one QALY is valued at around $100,000–$150,000 [1]. In the UK, a WELLBY is valued at £13,000 [2]. Such thresholds help governments and philanthropists decide whether interventions are cost-effective and worth implementing.
However, these metrics (plus the DALY) are largely insensitive to instances of extreme suffering (at least in their current form), so if we want to perform cost-effectiveness analyses of interventions aimed at reducing extreme suffering, we need either to supplement these metrics or introduce new ones.
This post explores some considerations relevant to deciding how much we should value averting instances of extreme suffering. In particular, we’re interested in strategies to estimate the dollar value of averting a “Day Lived in Extreme Suffering” (DLES), defined as a day spent in “the most urgent suffering at the level of approximately 9/10 and above.” [3] However, I won’t attempt [...]
Outline:
(02:31) Reasoning about a Day Lived in Extreme Suffering
(06:23) Extreme psychological suffering
(09:44) Improving existing metrics vs developing new metrics
(12:07) Challenges in quantifying extreme suffering
(20:34) Potential approaches
(20:48) Governmental approaches
(21:23) 1. Willingness-to-pay methods
(24:22) 2. Precedent methods
(25:51) 3. Opportunity cost methods
(26:55) 4. GDP-based methods
(27:33) Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)
(30:23) Philanthropic approaches
(31:51) Discussion
(34:19) Conclusion
(35:15) References
First published:
July 26th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z4Hb8tZsuRCXmy3mM/how-much-should-we-value-averting-a-day-lived-in-extreme
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Today I'm launching SB53.info, a resource to help the public understand California's Senate Bill 53. The site shows the text of SB 53 enriched with annotations to explain its political and scientific context.
What does SB 53 do?
In a nutshell, SB 53 says seven things. These are the four I consider most important:
- Every large AI developer must write, publish, and follow a safety policy (§ 22757.12.a).
- Every year starting in 2030, a large AI developer must get an independent auditor to verify that (1) they are following their own safety policy, and (2) the safety policy is clear enough that it's possible to determine whether the developer is following it (§ 22757.14).
- Every frontier model released by a large AI developer must have a published model card (§ 22757.12.c).
- A large AI developer is civilly liable if they break any of these rules (§ 22757.16).
And [...]
Outline:
(00:25) What does SB 53 do?
(08:30) What do I think of SB 53?
First published:
July 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hKB27TZmFPGPJqgvJ/introducing-sb53-info
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary:
Discovering EA recently has made me reconsider how I think about my career and impact. Instead of switching sectors entirely, I'm exploring how to bring EA principles into the work I'm already doing.
I stumbled onto EA about two months ago through a friend who kept mentioning "cost-effectiveness" in conversations about development work. Initially, I was skeptical, another framework claiming to solve everything? But the more I read, the more I realized I'd been wrestling with many of these questions without having the language for them.
What clicked for me
The biggest shift has been moving from "What sector should I work in?" to "How can I maximize impact wherever I am?" I've been working as a communication specialist for a religious organization for a while now, and my first instinct was to completely pivot toward a more obviously EA-aligned organization.
But when I started applying EA thinking [...]
First published:
July 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2wwt6PiuFNdxEcvix/two-months-into-ea-why-i-m-rethinking-my-approach-to-impact
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Crosspost of my blog article.
I just took the Giving What We Can pledge, which is a pledge to give away at least 10% of my income over the course of my life to highly effective charities. I think you should take it too!
We live in a time of unprecedented prosperity and abundance. Americans today live like kings in the ancient past. We have access to technology that would have been considered magic even just a few hundred years ago. Even relatively poor Americans are richer than nearly everyone who has ever lived.
At the same time, the world is filled with huge and pressing problems. Children whose parents survive on two dollars a day die in their beds, because their parents can’t afford medical care. Animals by the billions are tortured in factory farms. Existential threats imperil the entire future.
For this reason, I pledged to take [...]
First published:
July 25th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jherCCFLzvZLnRvXW/why-i-just-took-the-giving-what-we-can-pledge
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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The Forum Team crossposted this with permission from Secret Third Thing. The author may not see comments.
Listicles are hacky, I know. But in any case, here are ten AI safety projects I'm pretty into.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think there's a real chance that AI systems capable of causing a catastrophe (including to the point of causing human extinction) are developed in the next decade. This is why I spend my days making grants to talented people working on projects that could reduce catastrophic risks from transformative AI.
I don't have a spreadsheet where I can plug in grant details and get an estimate of basis points of catastrophic risk reduction (and if I did, I wouldn't trust the results). But over the last two years working in this role, I’ve at least developed some Intuitions™ about promising projects that I’d like [...]
Outline:
(01:09) 1. AI security field-building
(02:37) 2. Technical AI governance research organization
(04:30) 3. Tracking sketchy AI agent behaviour in the wild
(06:39) 4. AI safety communications consultancy
(08:25) 5. AI lab monitor
(10:50) 6. AI safety living literature reviews
(12:36) 7. $10 billion AI resilience plan
(14:00) 8. AI tools for fact-checking
(15:35) 9. AI auditors
(17:20) 10. AI economic impacts tracker
(19:25) Caveats, hedges, clarifications
First published:
July 24th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/D6ECZQMFcskpiGP7Q/ten-ai-safety-proj
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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The most common way to identify the effective altruism movement is by pointing. Effective altruists are:
- The people who try to help the global poor in ways backed up by randomized controlled trials, generally favoring public health programs.
- The people who try to improve conditions for farmed animals through corporate outreach and policy advocacy, and who care about weird groups of animals like insects and wild animals.
- The people who spend a lot of time worrying that we’re going to make artificial intelligences and they’re going to kill everyone.
This raises many questions, like what the heck do these three groups have to do with each other and what they get out of posting on the same forums and going to the same conferences.
Perhaps we could seek out definitions that would help us. The Center for Effective Altruism says effective altruism is “a framework and research field [...]
First published:
July 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wES2tZzZDnEnxm4aQ/effective-altruism-an-unmanifesto
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Martyn James | Co-founder of Clear Solutions
Martyn spent more than a decade at Google in technical partnership roles before exploring a career transition, realising that he was starting to feel a bit restless in his career. “Life was good,” he recalls, “but I wanted to do something a little more worthwhile.”
Martyn first heard about effective altruism (EA) in passing around 2013 from a colleague, though he wasn’t initially interested in the space. “I remember Googling it and thinking, ‘it's a bunch of Oxford philosophers, probably not for me.'” Years later, in 2020, Martyn was at home on parental leave. He began listening to the 80,000 Hours podcast and the ideas resonated. Eventually, he joined the EA Introductory Program. “It was the first time I found a structured, evidence-based path for people who wanted to do good.”
Though still sleep-deprived and caring for a newborn, Martyn kept exploring [...]
First published:
July 24th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nBtKgo3TLhfZTyAcW/google-to-co-founding-a-global-health-charity-mid-career
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Here's a Career Conversations Week debate for you:
The percentage of EAs earning to give is too lowPlace your vote or view results.disagreeagree Clarifications:
- We can treat the [...]
Outline:
(00:22) Clarifications:
(01:03) Reading list:
First published:
July 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CazfSjmhK8SuDfLpf/are-enough-eas-earning-to-give
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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I'm the 1Day Sooner program director for indoor air quality (IAQ). In practice, that means I research indoor air cleaning interventions (including how they work and their associated economics) and do relevant public communication and policy analysis. I spend most of my time reading academic literature, writing about IAQ (for policy or general audiences), and talking to people. 1Day Sooner is small and idiosyncratic.[1] I don't know if my job description generalizes well to older and/or larger organizations, and I think other orgs would be unlikely to give this title to someone of my age and experience level.
How I got here
1Day Sooner was founded at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and I learned about it from some EA influencer's public Facebook post. (Possibly Rob Wiblin?) I signed up to volunteer, and later contracted, for 1Day Sooner while in grad school for mechanical engineering.[2] The volunteering was [...]
Outline:
(00:51) How I got here
(02:10) Responsibilities
(03:28) A representative segment of a weeks to-do list
(04:21) Some representative work output
(04:48) Pros & Cons
First published:
July 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZFbsCqAJ6KY4WHEeZ/writing-about-my-job-program-director
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Epistemic Status: These observations come from my personal experience trying to advance a specific idea (Profit for Good) while working full-time as a lawyer on unrelated work. I'm sharing my impressions and frustrations, which may or may not generalize to others developing EA-aligned projects outside traditional pathways—whether that's creating new theories, developing interventions, researching neglected areas, organizing communities, or working on any high-impact initiative while maintaining an unrelated career. I have deep uncertainty about how much of what I've experienced reflects systemic issues versus my particular circumstances, idea, or approach. Others pursuing impact work part-time may have very different experiences, and there may be support systems I've failed to find or utilize effectively. I share this not as a definitive critique but as one data point that might resonate with others in similar situations.
—
Since late 2021, I've been developing a framework that could redirect $100 billion [...]
Outline:
(01:43) The Visibility Gap
(02:46) What Ive Built Despite the Constraints
(05:12) The Real Cost
(08:17) Lessons from Five Years in the Trenches
(10:04) Moving Forward
First published:
July 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cmYoAuiCSyxry6HoF/building-ea-projects-with-an-unrelated-full-time-job
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The cause prioritization landscape in EA is changing. Prominent groups have shut down, others have been founded, and everyone's trying to figure out how to prepare for AI. This is the third in a series of posts critically examining the state of cause prioritization and strategies for moving forward.
Executive Summary* An increasingly common argument is that we should prioritize work in AI over work in other cause areas (e.g. farmed animal welfare, reducing nuclear risks) because the impending AI revolution undermines the value of working in those other areas. * We consider three versions of the argument: + Aligned superintelligent AI will solve many of the problems that we currently face in other cause areas. + Misaligned AI will be so disastrous that none of the existing problems will matter because we’ll all be dead or worse. + AI will be so disruptive that our current theories of change will [...]
Outline:
(00:30) Executive Summary
(02:27) Introduction
(06:07) Three versions of the argument
(06:11) Argument 1: Aligned AI will solve it
(12:22) Which areas will be solvable by AI?
(13:04) Dimensions necessary for success
(14:51) Is AI effective on those dimensions?
(16:28) Timeline of impact
(18:01) Argument 2: Misaligned AI will destroy us
(21:12) Argument 3: AI will change the landscape, we should wait for the dust to settle
(24:49) The general structure of the argument
(25:44) Objections to Premise 1 and 2: The chances of a strong AI bottleneck are overestimated
(29:12) Objection to Premise 3: AI work doesn't win by default
(30:25) Objection to Premise 3: Work on other cause areas causally contributes to the AI revolution going well
(33:13) Conclusion
(34:30) Acknowledgements
First published:
July 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fkHc5uxfauZ3EFkJ9/do-short-ai-timelines-make-other-cause-areas-useless
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Posts from my ancestors: Aaron Gertler | Lizka Vaintrob
I love my job. I didn't expect to be in a job that I could be proud of just a few years after university, but now I am[1]. I'm very grateful for that.
Sometimes I've heard people worry that a job in meta-effective altruism would be unmotivating, but I disagree. When I see a great conversation happening on the Forum, a valuable post existing because I nudged someone, or someone making a move to more impactful work because of a link in the EA Newsletter, I feel great, and partially responsible.
The job isn't easy. I have a lot of balls to juggle, even when I'm feeling down or unmotivated. But overall, I really can't imagine a better job for me to be in right now. I'm always learning, and getting better at skills I care about.
I'm not sure [...]
Outline:
(01:31) What is my job?
(03:00) How did I get here?
(07:33) Why here and not somewhere else?
(07:37) Why here?
(10:10) Why not somewhere else?
(11:53) What do I do every day?
(12:50) Skills - what helps, what can I get better at?
First published:
July 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6eoseCNpCStc4KS4d/writing-about-my-job-content-strategist-cea
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This forum—and the EA community surrounding it—is a bit of an echo chamber. We need people who care about EA values in the rest of the world for several reasons: influence and evangelism, cross-pollination, reality checks, and pragmatism.
Influence and evangelism
The only way for EA to grow is to expose non-EAs to EA concepts. We need people working in all sectors and organizations who can be EA evangelists and ambassadors.
This is especially important in roles like government policy and oversight where decisions have outsized influence.
Cross-pollination and reality checks
As much as non-EAs can learn from us, we can also learn from them. The more we understand how “the real world” works, the better we will be at honing our strategies for getting the world to focus on the important, tractable, and neglected areas. And it helps develop empathy for people who aren't living by EA principles.
[...]
Outline:
(00:27) Influence and evangelism
(00:49) Cross-pollination and reality checks
(01:13) Pragmatism
(02:46) Max out your employer match(even if you use another donor's money)
(03:08) Resources
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QNxc9DGcyRAhdyypF/we-need-people-working-for-non-ea-orgs
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Over the past 4-5 years, I have poured a lot of time and energy into "doing good", through a combination of community building, policy advocacy, and volunteering with EA charities. On reflection, I think I have worked too much, and I negelected other important parts of my life. I am writing this in the hope that this gives some people permission to reflect on their workload and consider cutting back.
I have been doing these projects while studying or working a chill 9-to-5 job, neither of which were really improving the world, so I always felt a pull towards potentially “impactful” side projects. It felt motivating to work on these side projects, instead of having to wait potentially 5-10 years until I could move into a job where I felt like I was making the world better.
Because I have mostly enjoyed these projects, and I’ve never felt [...]
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CGHwrEcEEKLSpnYY7/a-reflection-i-worked-too-much
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. The following text presents a condensed summary of "The state of global catastrophic risk research: a bibliometric review" by Jehn et al. (2025), published in Earth System Dynamics. The paper represents the first systematic bibliometric analysis of global catastrophic risk (GCR) and existential risk (ER) literature, examining a large number of documents to map the field's development, identify research clusters, and assess current challenges. The full paper includes extensive supplementary materials, detailed methodological descriptions, and over 280 references and can be found here (open access): https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/16/1053/2025/
Visual Abstract
Introduction
The field of global catastrophic risk (GCR) and existential risk (ER) research has grown considerably over the past two decades, evolving from a nascent area of study into an established research domain. This first systematic bibliometric analysis of the GCR/ER literature examines all large number documents to understand how the field has developed, what topics [...]
Outline:
(00:52) Visual Abstract
(01:23) Introduction
(02:23) Growth and Development of the Field
(03:40) Research Clusters and Their Interconnections
(05:35) Geographic and Demographic Patterns
(06:41) Gaps and Future Directions
(07:52) Implications and Recommendations
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vfmsi9SNAyPSZF2ys/the-state-of-global-catastrophic-risk-research
Linkpost URL:
https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/16/1053/2025/esd-16-1053-2025.html
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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I am writing this to reflect on my experience interning with the Fish Welfare Initiative, and to provide my thoughts on why more students looking to build EA experience should do something similar.
Back in October, I cold-emailed the Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) with my resume and a short cover letter expressing interest in an unpaid in-person internship in the summer of 2025. I figured I had a better chance of getting an internship by building my own door than competing with hundreds of others to squeeze through an existing door, and the opportunity to travel to India carried strong appeal. Haven, the Executive Director of FWI, set up a call with me that mostly consisted of him listing all the challenges of living in rural India — 110° F temperatures, electricity outages, lack of entertainment… When I didn’t seem deterred, he offered me an internship.
I [...]
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SmiXeQcnMD7qmAfgS/why-you-should-build-your-own-ea-internship-abroad
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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TL;DR: Open Philanthropy (OP) is handing off monetary support for AI safety university group organizers to Kairos. Our new Pathfinder Fellowship will replace both OP's University Organizer Fellowship and our Fieldbuilder Support Program (FSP), bringing funding and mentorship for AI safety student groups into one streamlined program.
We’re excited to use the flexibility of a smaller organization like Kairos to provide more tailored and comprehensive support to student organizers than was possible at OP. By bringing these programs together under one roof, we can execute on a more ambitious version of AI safety group support, one that is more responsive to organizers’ needs and scales up our existing efforts. By making this change, we also hope to provide more streamlined access to funding and a smoother experience for those running groups via integrated fiscal sponsorship through BERI.
Note: Pathfinder is only for groups focused on AI safety or policy. [...]
Outline:
(01:21) How do I apply to Pathfinder?
(01:38) What kinds of support will Pathfinder provide?
(02:47) Will the bar for getting funding change?
(03:01) What if I need funding but not mentorship?
(03:31) Will the amount of available funding change?
(03:43) What will change about funding logistics?
(04:26) What is Kairos?
(04:44) Where can I find more information?
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/auWQcRSpsMbchfw6G/introducing-the-pathfinder-fellowship-funding-and-mentorship
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a post on behalf of Open Philanthropy's GCR Capacity Building team announcing that, effective as of the publication of this post, we are closing down our university group funding program and handing over the funding for most university AI safety groups to Kairos, an AI safety field-building organization. You can see their post, announcing their funding program and plans, here.
In our previous post about passing on EA group funding to CEA, we discussed why we’re generally interested in moving our small grants programs elsewhere when possible. While there haven’t previously been clear candidates for taking on monetary support for AI safety groups, we now think Kairos is well-positioned to do so – they have (in our opinion) a strong team and a substantive track record of supporting university AI safety group organizers.
As with our previous changes to this program, we continue to think student groups [...]
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/84emBPD7z3oWQxpKK/open-philanthropy-is-passing-ai-safety-university-group
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
There are interesting discussions on the Effective Altruism Forum concerning the welfare of the smallest but most abundant animals: Should we consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails? And does animal farming impact soil nematodes, mites, and springtails hugely more than directly affected animals?
If tiny soil animals such as nematodes have on average a negative welfare overall, even if that level of suffering is small, the numbers of those animals are so large that the total suffering of all soil animals could easily be larger than the total suffering of for example farmed animals. In agricultural land, there are much less nematodes than in natural habitats, such as forests. Animal farming increases agricultural land and hence strongly decreases the populations of soil animals on earth. If there are fewer soil animals, there is less soil animal suffering. Could the decrease in suffering of soil animals be [...]
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/udcCBBwGnCneLRjkH/should-we-consider-the-welfare-of-small-soil-animals-on-the
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. Cross-posted from my blog
Introduction
In 2009, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo published Dead Aid, a scathing critique of Western development efforts in Africa. She argued that decades of well-meaning aid had failed not only to lift African countries out of poverty, but had actively undermined their institutions, encouraged corruption, and created a culture of dependence. Aid, she concluded, was not saving Africa, it was holding it back.
Moyo was not the first to make such claims, and she wouldn't be the last. From economists (like William Easterly's The White Man's Burden) to anthropologists (like Jason Hickel's The Divide) a growing body of literature has criticized how foreign assistance, however generous in appearance, can replicate the very hierarchies and dependencies that colonialism once enforced through direct rule.
Today, a new form of philanthropy has emerged: Effective Altruism. EA, as it's known, is a movement built around [...]
Outline:
(00:18) Introduction
(02:05) What Is Neocolonialism?
(04:03) 1. Does Effective Altruism Keep Poor People Poor?
(06:20) Counterarguments
(08:30) 2. Does EA Keep Poor People Dependent?
(11:57) Counterarguments
(14:02) 3. Does EA Fail To Listen To Poor People?
(17:41) Counterarguments
(18:46) Conclusion
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/48Wr4jd7pooKsMzke/is-effective-altruism-neocolonial-an-overview-of-the
Linkpost URL:
https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/is-effective-altruism-neocolonial
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Happy Career Conversations Week!
We are a group of recruiters at impact-focused organizations, and we’re happy to answer your questions about applying to jobs, work trials, interviewing, references, and anything in between.
We’ll answer all the questions we can (subject to personal time constraints) by August 1. Ask us anything!
Participants include:
- Calum Richards (Recruiter at GiveWell)
- Evan Vandermeer (Recruiter at Open Philanthropy)
- Dee Kathuria (Recruiting Consultant at Open Philanthropy)
- Judith Rensing (Chief of Staff at Charity Entrepreneurship / Ambitious Impact; previously Director of Recruitment and Talent Specialist)
- Phil Zealley (Recruiting Lead at Open Philanthropy)
- Rika Gabriel (People Operations Senior Associate at the Centre for Effective Altruism)
A couple caveats:
- You should think of our answers as personal opinions or advice; not as official views from our employers.
- If we run into serious time constraints, we’ll prioritize questions with more upvotes.
- We might not answer every question. [...]
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/t4XKQMobYoTurjcpL/ama-with-recruiters-at-impact-focused-orgs
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary
Following Joey's transition announcement, we're actively searching for exceptional leadership to guide AIM into its next phase.
- Find the full job description here
- To apply, please visit the following link
- Recommend someone you think could be a great fit here
- Location: London strongly preferred. Remote candidates willing to work from London at least 3 months a year and otherwise overlapping at least 6 hours with 9 am to 5 pm BST will be considered. We are happy to sponsor UK work visas.
- Employment Type: Full-time (35 hours)
- Application Deadline: rolling until August 10, 2025
- Start Date: as soon as possible (with some flexibility for the right candidate)
- Compensation: £45,000–£90,000 (for details on our compensation policy see full job description)
Leadership Transition
On March 15th, Joey announced he's stepping away from his role as CEO of AIM, with his planned last day as December 1st. He'll transition to a board member role while [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Summary
(01:12) Leadership Transition
(01:32) The Opportunity
(02:31) Our Track Record
(03:07) What Does Working at AIM Look Like?
(03:21) What Were Looking For
(03:51) CEO Requirements
(03:55) Essential Qualifications
(07:43) How to Apply
(08:36) How to Recommend Someone
(08:54) Questions
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/k3swpN2FJzooQZAyw/aim-is-seeking-a-new-ceo
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Kathleen Perell | Chief of Staff to the COO at the Centre for Effective Altruism
Kathleen Perell began her career with a clear goal: obtain a law degree and then find meaningful, mission-aligned work. While she was never committed to a particular cause, she knew she wanted to do something good for others. Unfortunately, like many, she faced the financial and institutional reality of legal education in the U.S., graduating with substantial debt and limited practical experience. To pay it off and gain career capital, Kathleen joined a prestigious law firm, learning how top lawyers think, negotiate, and operate. She stayed for three years, then moved to a mid-sized firm where she could take a step back, focus on starting a family, and reflect on what her “ultimate plan” might be.
Over the years, Kathleen cycled through roles in corporate law, nonprofits, and tech, spending quite a few years [...]
Outline:
(00:14) Kathleen Perell | Chief of Staff to the COO at the Centre for Effective Altruism
(05:50) Kathleen's advice to those considering a career transition:
First published:
July 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BkfeavAfHEWT7C9aD/corporate-law-to-cea-operations-mid-career-transitions-with
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Last week, I joined “Revolutionist's Night” — a cabal aiming to radically improve animal welfare, with some flavor of 1800s slavery abolitionism or the 1700s American revolution. Our topic for the evening was inspired by Aaron Boddy's post “The current market price for animal welfare is zero”: can we create a market where anyone can directly buy credits for animal welfare?
I’m very sympathetic to this idea, and similar ideas like Paul Christiano's for offsetting factory-farmed eggs. (A year ago, I spent some time brainstorming how one might actually implement the egg-offset-thing.)
Some reasons I’d be excited:
- Markets are great at optimizing for particular objectives, if you shape them correctly. The world abounds in cheap high-quality consumer goods, thanks to markets.
- There are some precedents for using markets for public goods, from carbon credit markets and renewable offsets (eg electric vehicle or solar credits)
- Welfare credits let you [...]
First published:
July 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34BKchKuN4wvR84Cy/questions-about-animal-welfare-markets
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The Strategic Animal Funding Circle just finished its first two rounds of grantmaking, and we ended up giving ~$900,000 across 16 organisations. Below is some brief reasoning behind why we were excited about these grants and broad factors that resulted in us not granting to other organisations. Overall we were pretty excited about the quality of applications we got and feel optimistic the circle will continue to run/deploy more in the future.
At the bottom of this post, you can find more information about the next round, how to apply and how to join as a donor.
Top four reasons we ruled out applications
Unclear theory of change
The most common reason an organisation was ruled out was for unclear theory of change. This has come up with other funding circles’ explanation copied from a prior writeup we made “Some applicants do not share sufficient reasoning on [...]
Outline:
(00:48) Top four reasons we ruled out applications
(03:47) Funded organisations
(04:00) Asia Accountability Initiative
(04:42) The Centre for Responsible Seafood
(05:16) Animal Policy International
(06:06) Projet Animaux Zoopolis
(07:02) An anonymous coalition aiming to limit public support for insect farming in France
(07:55) An anonymous initiative trying to promote pain-mitigation strategies in farms
(08:20) Bob Fischer - Academic research on tools for incorporating animal welfare into benefit-cost analysis
(09:18) Arthropoda Foundation
(10:06) Centre for Responsible Food Business
(10:48) Animal Partisan
(11:38) AETP - Animal Enterprise Transparency Project
(12:12) Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
(13:03) International Council for Animal Welfare
(14:04) Insect Welfare Research Society
(15:00) Nettverk for dyrs frihet
(16:03) Get involved
First published:
July 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fRQejQGJsKx33ud8u/strategic-animals-funding-circle-results-from-first-two
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I learned about EA in mid-2022, finished my degree and got “properly” involved in my local community in 2023, got my first paid role in the movement in 2024 and got promoted to Managing Director at Hive at the beginning of 2025.
In career-related conversations, I often get asked about how I got into my role. I used to be hesitant to share my career journey, since it seemed riddled with luck and privilege. In many instances, I felt like I was just in the right place at the right time, and many of my actions were only possible because I could dedicate significant time (~10h per week) for the largest part of a year to pursuing what I found to be impactful. However, every time I do tell the story, people seem to find it useful for various reasons. Over time, I identified a few takeaways that seem [...]
Outline:
(01:35) 0. Deciding to pivot my career
(04:01) 1. Creating my own opportunities
(08:02) My key takeaways
(09:31) 2. Getting noticed for my work
(13:09) My key takeaways
First published:
July 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/D4Zbg6cWwWQPhL3Wo/reflecting-on-my-career-journey
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Introduction
This payout report covers the Animal Welfare Fund's (AWF) grantmaking from April 1, 2025 to June 30, 2025 (3 months). It follows the previous January-March 2025 payout report.
Organizational updates
-
In May, the AWF welcomed two full-time fund managers: Neil Dullaghan, who joined as a Senior Fund Manager, and Renata Scarellis, who joined as a Fund Manager. They bring experience in animal welfare grantmaking, research, and advocacy:
- Dr. Neil Dullaghan is a full-time senior fund manager with the AWF, where he has worked part-time since 2022. Previously, he worked at Rethink Priorities as a Senior Research Manager on their farmed animal welfare team and led a regranting fund focused on EU farmed animal welfare policy. He holds a PhD in Political & Social Science from the European University Institute, an MPhil in European Politics & Society from the University of Oxford, and a BA [...]
Outline:
(00:16) Introduction
(00:35) Organizational updates
(03:11) Overview of Q2, 2025 grants
(03:50) Highlighted Grants
(09:19) Grants Funded with AWF's Partners
(10:29) All Grants We Approved During This Time Period
First published:
July 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CXoHMCNwJ6HkbxazZ/animal-welfare-fund-payout-recommendations-from-april-to-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary After three decades spanning startups, consulting, banking, entrepreneurship, and impact nonprofits, I'm sharing lessons that might be useful for others navigating career decisions. I was prompted by the Career Conversations Week post noting that "EA skews pretty young, so if your career can be measured in decades rather than years, you probably have a lot to share!" Rather than my specific job history, I'll focus on lessons learned, though I'm wary of biases or being too general to be applicable.
My career began in 1994 after finishing Gymnasium (the German equivalent of high school) in Germany. I had to do civilian service and planned on studying after, but was offered a traineeship at an advertising agency. This led to a diverse 30-year journey through multiple industries and roles. Rather than recount specific details of my path, I'll focus on lessons I learned, though I acknowledge these may reflect [...]
Outline:
(00:13) Summary
(01:42) The biggest opportunities came through unexpected connections
(02:38) Learning what I didnt want proved surprisingly valuable
(03:10) I learned fastest when I was genuinely excited
(03:50) Discovering trust is a valuable currency
(04:37) Financial prudence created unexpected freedom
(05:23) Finding mentors in unexpected places
(06:08) I learned to insert myself into opportunities
(07:03) I had to actively build my resilience
(07:52) Experimenting before making big commitments
(08:31) Avoiding living someone elses life
(09:08) Neglecting social connections and paying a price
(09:43) Caveats and limitations
(10:12) Acknowledgements
First published:
July 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xRfZMmfoCNq8DWcKB/from-rave-websites-to-ai-risk-30-years-of-career-lessons
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I tend to send the recording of this talk quite a lot when I’m asked to share my story about how I started Hive, so I thought for folks’ convenience I’d make it into a post so that it's more scannable. Some of the info is a bit outdated, I tried to include updates in brackets. I included some slides to help demonstrate the point, but you can find all my slides in the resource section below.
Hi everyone, and thank you for coming to my talk! I’m Sofia Balderson, co-founder of Hive—a global community for farmed animal advocates. Hive connects people to increase their impact, and we’re best known for:
- Hive Slack – an active online space with over 3,000 animal advocates
- Hive Highlights – our bi-weekly newsletter with ~3,000 subscribers featuring the latest news, research, and impact opportunities in the movement
We also host [...]
Outline:
(01:32) Disclaimers:
(02:03) Talk Overview
(02:27) 1. Identifying the Right Problem
(03:46) 2. Finding the Right Team
(04:58) 3. Building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
(06:37) 4. Measuring Impact
(07:54) 5. Funding and Rejections
(09:08) 6. Lessons in Fundraising
(09:13) Build relationships before you ask for money
(09:50) Learn to cope with rejections--they're not personal
(10:27) 7. Deciding Whether to Commit
(11:44) Q&A section:
(19:16) Resources
(19:43) Want to get more support for your project or get in involved in farmed animal advocacy?
First published:
July 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4qsjWrHDpyQLRfJB4/from-a-side-project-to-a-funded-organisation-my-story-and
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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Hi everyone! This post is the first in a series of four profiles on mid-career transitions in EA. Andrés very kindly allowed me to interview him on his shift from private equity to shrimp welfare. I think it takes a lot of courage to make drastic career changes, especially those that result in significant pay cuts and uncertainty. I hope this series is helpful to those considering it! And separately, I found it really lovely to hear how excited each person was about EA.
Andrés Jimenez Zorrilla | Philanthropy Consultant at Open Philanthropy, Co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project
Andrés Jiménez Zorilla originally spent 15 years in investment banking and real estate private equity, leading the Iberian business for a European real estate fund and working in global finance hubs like London, New York, and Qatar. While the work was intellectually demanding in some ways (structuring deals, scaling companies [...]
Outline:
(00:45) Andrés Jimenez Zorrilla | Philanthropy Consultant at Open Philanthropy, Co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project
(05:32) Andrés' advice for others considering a similar shift:
First published:
July 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S5zJcEbdGoi8oarkC/private-equity-to-shrimp-welfare-mid-career-transitions-in
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
(about careers)
As part of Career Conversations Week on the EA Forum, I’ve gathered together some impact-focused career advisors to answer any questions you might have.
Career Advisors from Probably Good, Successif, Animal Advocacy Careers and 80,000 Hours will be online throughout the week to answer your questions. Interested and knowledgeable readers are also welcome to chip in! Leave your questions as comments below.
Some details on our advisors: Probably Good is a nonprofit organisation dedicated to helping people build careers that are good for them and good for the world. They offer online guides, a job board, and one-on-one advising, among other services.
Successif offers tailored one-on-one career guidance to experienced professionals interested in transitioning into technical AI risk or AI governance and policy work.
Animal Advocacy Careers bridges the critical talent gap within the effective animal advocacy movement, ensuring passionate, skilled professionals are matched with the roles [...]
Outline:
(00:36) Some details on our advisors:
(02:12) The kind of questions you might like to ask:
First published:
July 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RYPiSnihBWKi6oBrL/ask-career-advisors-anything
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TLDRWhen we look across all jobs globally, many of us in the EA community occupy positions that would rank in the 99.9th percentile or higher by our own preferences within jobs that we could plausibly get.[1] Whether you work at an EA-aligned organization, hold a high-impact role elsewhere, or have a well-compensated position which allows you to make significant high effectiveness donations, your job situation is likely extraordinarily fortunate and high impact by global standards. This career conversations week, it's worth reflecting on this and considering how we can make the most of these opportunities.
Intro I think job choice is one of the great advantages of development. Before the industrial revolution, nearly everyone had to be a hunter-gatherer or a farmer, and they typically didn’t get a choice between those.
Now there is typically some choice in low income countries, and typically a lot of choice in [...]
Outline:
(00:09) TLDR
(00:48) Intro
(01:21) The Mathematics of Job Preference
(02:20) EA Perspective on Job Impact
(04:10) Dimensions of Job Preference
(04:57) Gratitude as Motivation
(05:34) Conclusion
First published:
July 21st, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SNL9YBGDRuiChAmQZ/grateful-for-job-choice
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary
We’re exploring the idea of building a career guidance platform aimed at helping the African diaspora - and professionals interested in development more broadly - pursue high-impact careers in Africa (or LMICs more broadly).
The goal is to shift talented individuals towards higher impact roles in Global Development. 80,000 Hours already does this for a certain subset of people in developed countries (and primarily for AI and existential risks), but there are a large number of diaspora and others who are specifically focused on development, are seeking this advice and could be guided towards higher impact careers.
This is still early stage, and I’d welcome feedback on all aspects, but particularly assessing the scale of potential impact, most promising focus areas, and potential funders and collaborators to speak to.
Problem Statement
Many members of the African diaspora express a desire to “give back” or “make a difference” [...]
First published:
July 20th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EiSHuf8e33BH2t3GX/80-000-hours-for-global-development
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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This is a link post. Note: This is a linkpost to an essay written by Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan and PHD candidate Sayash Kapoor entitled “Could AI slow science?”. The authors may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Could AI slow science?
AI leaders have predicted that it will enable dramatic scientific progress: curing cancer, doubling the human lifespan, colonizing space, and achieving a century of progress in the next decade. Given the cuts to federal funding for science in the U.S., the timing seems perfect, as AI could replace the need for a large scientific workforce.
It's a common-sense view, at least among technologists, that AI will speed science greatly as it gets adopted in every part of the scientific pipeline — summarizing existing literature, generating new ideas, performing data analyses and experiments to test them, writing up findings, and performing “peer” review.
[...]
Outline:
(00:27) Could AI slow science?
(03:12) Science has been slowing -- the production-progress paradox
(10:15) Why is progress slowing? Can AI help?
(15:44) Science is not ready for software, let alone AI
(22:16) AI might prolong the reliance on flawed theories
(26:10) Human understanding remains essential
(32:31) Implications for the future of science
(39:24) Final thoughts
(40:44) Further reading
First published:
July 17th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TSFF4Jpef2dr5PJPd/how-ai-could-slow-scientific-progress-linkpost
Linkpost URL:
https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/could-ai-slow-science
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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This is a link post. Tom Davidson from Forethought Research and I have a new paper responding to some recent skeptical takes on the Singularity Hypothesis (e.g. this one). Roughly half the paper is philosophical and the other half is empirical. Both halves argue that we should take the Singularity Hypothesis more seriously than many people have been taking it of late. I'm sharing this with the community here because (i) I think it will be of general interest, and (ii) this is a project I'm still working on, and I would appreciate feedback from the community.
Here's the abstract:
The singularity hypothesis posits a period of rapid technological progress following the point at which AI systems become able to contribute to AI research. Recent philosophical criticisms of the singularity hypothesis offer a range of theoretical and empirical arguments against the possibility or likelihood of such a period of [...]
First published:
July 16th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AwJbvANYabeFgqkpH/rebooting-the-singularity
Linkpost URL:
https://philpapers.org/archive/KIRRTS-2.pdf
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. (This is the video and transcript of a public talk I gave at Mox in San Francisco in July 2025, on long-term equilibria post-AGI. It's a longer version of the talk I gave at this workshop. The slides are also available here.)
Introduction
Thank you. Okay. Hi. Thanks for coming.
Aims for this talk
So: can goodness compete? It's a classic question, and it crops up constantly in a certain strand of futurism, so I'm going to try to analyze it and understand it more precisely. And in particular I want to distinguish between a few different variants, some of which are more fundamental problems than others. And then I want to try to hone in on what I see as the hardest version of the problem – and in particular, possible ways good values can have inherent disadvantages and competition with [...]
Outline:
(00:32) Introduction
(00:51) Aims for this talk
(02:06) Basic vibe
(03:44) Lineage of concern
(04:45) What I mean by goodness
(07:38) What I mean by competition
(09:35) Can *humans* compete?
(11:30) Some distinctions
(14:40) Alignment taxes
(17:14) More fundamental variants
(18:14) Negative sum dynamics
(20:26) The strategy stealing assumption
(21:38) Locust-like value systems
(25:27) Other ways the strategy stealing assumption might fail
(28:21) Addressing failures of the strategy stealing assumption
(31:25) Is preventing/constraining competition in this way even possible?
(33:31) Is preventing/constraining competition in this way desirable?
(35:19) What is a locust world actually like?
(36:29) Might a locust world be less bleak than this?
(43:09) Current overall take
(44:28) Poem: Witchgrass
(46:47) Q&A
First published:
July 17th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ax258h7adna7xkNSz/video-and-transcript-of-talk-on-can-goodness-compete-1
Linkpost URL:
https://joecarlsmith.substack.com/p/video-and-transcript-of-talk-on-can
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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This is a link post. The brand NestFresh eggs has just started selling eggs from in-ovo sexed hens in the US. Right now, they are only available at some Whole Foods locations in the Southwest, soon to be expanded to other locations. Supporting those eggs now is particularly valuable, as their market performance will influence other companies' decisions to adopt the technology. See the blog post linked above for details!
First published:
July 18th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qciXqDSjBtqTGkTos/eggs-from-in-ovo-sexed-hens-are-now-available-in-the-us
Linkpost URL:
https://optimistsbarn.substack.com/p/you-can-now-buy-eggs-from-in-ovo
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Sometimes working on animal issues feels like an uphill battle, with alternative protein losing its trendy status with VCs, corporate campaigns hitting blocks in enforcement and veganism being stuck at the same percentage it's been for decades. However, despite these things I personally am more optimistic about the animal movement than I have ever been (despite following the movement for 10+ years). What gives?
At AIM we think a lot about the ingredients of a good charity (talent, funding and idea) and more and more recently I have been thinking about the ingredients of a good movement or ecosystem that I think has a couple of extra ingredients (culture and infrastructure). I think on approximately four-fifths of these prerequisites the animal movement is at all-time highs. And like betting on a charity before it launches, I am far more confident that a movement that has these ingredients will lead [...]
First published:
July 16th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BDByEBEbFexb54QEm/why-i-am-more-optimistic-about-the-animal-movement-this-year
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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Originally submitted as a project for the AI Safety Fundamentals AI Governance course in April 2025; edited and somewhat expanded for publication on the EA Forum in July 2025.
Thanks to Yip Fai Tse, Arturs Kanepajs, Max Taylor, Constance Li, Kevin Xia, Adrià Moret and Sam Tucker-Davis for advice and suggestions before and/or after the writing of this piece.
Introduction
We review how major AI governance frameworks address – or, more commonly, overlook – the interests of sentient nonhumans, including both biological animals and potentially sentient artificial beings. Our analysis reveals a systemic exclusion of nonhuman interests across governance instruments, with few meaningful acknowledgments of their moral status.
Grounded in an ethical perspective that values sentience regardless of species or substrate, we propose approaches to integrate nonhuman interests into these AI governance frameworks, focusing on the EU AI Act and various UN AI governance instruments.
Our proposals are deliberately [...]
Outline:
(00:38) Introduction
(01:37) 1. Policy review
(02:05) 1.1. EU Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, 2019
(03:08) 1.2. EU AI Act, 2024
(04:12) 1.3. United Nations policy
(04:42) 1.4. Serbia's Ethical Guidelines for AI, 2023
(05:07) 2. Analysis
(07:46) 3. Proposals
(08:10) 3.1. Updating the EU AI Act
(08:15) Legal Foundation
(09:19) Areas of amendment
(12:03) 3.2. Creating a UN Stewardship for All Life declaration
(12:51) 3.3. Adding to the Sustainable Development Goals
(13:55) 3.4. Updating the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI
(14:50) 3.5. Expanding the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on AI
(15:52) 4. Conclusion
First published:
July 15th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gmYF7jqyGTuiweEcB/addressing-the-nonhuman-gap-in-intergovernmental-ai
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This poll was linked in the July edition of the Effective Altruism Newsletter. If you haven't got your newsletter yet, it'll be with you in a few hours.
It is possible to rationally prioritise between causes without engaging deeply on philosophical issuesPlace your vote or view results.https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/chqwwnhjweifDXCsi/july-25-ea-newsletter-poll ---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. Linkpost as I am mostly writting on substack now.
TL;DR:
NGOs have a unique advantage over for-profits in their ability to cooperate and build common goods, yet few fully leverage "ecosystem thinking." This approach extends beyond an organization's direct impact to consider the entire field's health. Effective ecosystem actors: 1) actively build and connect movements by supporting newcomers and making strategic introductions; 2) practice radical transparency about both successes and failures; and 3) share abundance (office space, funding opportunities, and talent) even when it doesn't directly benefit them. The goal should be solving problems, not growing individual organizations. This cooperative approach often creates impact far greater than the sum of individual efforts.
First published:
July 14th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DMDnikBCG8pWJxkrp/solving-problems-not-building-empires-the-value-of
Linkpost URL:
https://measuredlife.substack.com/p/solving-problems-not-building-empires
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
There is an important consultation happening right now on revising EU animal welfare laws - covering cages, import standards, male chick culling, and welfare indicators. If you're an EU Citizen, I encourage you to take 15-30 minutes over the next few days to respond.
- Deadline: July 16th (midnight CET)
- Who can respond: European citizens, animal advocacy organisations, scientists, industry groups, farmers etc. (Non-EU citizens can respond but we expect this will carry less weight)
- Format: 4,000 character limit + one PDF attachment (max 5MB)
- Access: Login using Google or Facebook via this link
DM me here for access to a response guide [1] that has evidence on each topic area. It is important to note, when using the guide, that diversifying responses is necessary as the Commission may group all responses that are considered coordinated/as part of a campaign, which would limit the impact of our efforts. [...]
First published:
July 14th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tsXzyPoNPgS2kgoBp/eu-citizens-animal-welfare-consultation-closing-soon-16-july
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Organisations using Rethink Priorities’ mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.disagreeagreeOrganisations using Rethink Priorities’ mainline welfare ranges, and not planning to consider effects on [...] ---
Outline:
(00:47) Summary
(02:29) I think organisations using RP's mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails
(05:23) Effects on soil nematodes should not be neglected just because they are unlikely to be sentient
(07:39) Effects on soil nematodes should not be neglected just because they may be beneficial or harmful
(09:51) Estimates of the expected effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails cannot be taken literally, but should still be considered
(11:45) Effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails should be considered even if they are very neglected in society
(13:24) Acknowledgements
First published:
July 13th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/48pwtmGtZfYHmqkur/debate-organisations-using-rethink-priorities-mainline
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Since January I’ve applied to ~25 EA-aligned roles. Every listing attracted hundreds of candidates (one passed 1,200). It seems we already have a very deep bench of motivated, values-aligned people, yet orgs still run long, resource-heavy hiring rounds.
That raises three things:
- Cost-effectiveness:
Are months-long searches and bespoke work-tests still worth the staff time and applicant burnout when shortlist-first approaches might fill 80% of roles faster with decent candidates? Sure, there can be differences in talent, but the question ought to be... how tangible is this difference and does it justify the cost of hiring? 2. Coordination:
Why aren’t orgs leaning harder on shared talent pools (e.g. HIP's database) to bypass public rounds? HIP is currently running an open search. 3. Messaging:
From the outside, repeated calls to 'consider an impactful EA career' could start to look pyramid-schemey if the movement can’t absorb the talent [...]
First published:
July 14th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ufjgCrtxhrEwxkdCH/is-ea-still-talent-constrained
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
As we mark one year since the launch of Mieux Donner, we wanted to share some reflections on our journey and our ongoing efforts to promote effective giving in France. Mieux Donner was founded through the Effective Incubation Programme by Ambitious Impact and Giving What We Can.
TLDR
- Prioritisation is important. And when the path forward is unclear, trying a lot of different potential priorities with high productivity leads to better results than analysis paralysis.
- Ask yourself what the purpose of your organisation is. If you are a mainly marketing/communication org, hire people from this sector (not engineers) and don’t be afraid to hire outside of EA.
- Effective altruism ideas are less controversial than we imagined and affiliation has created no (or very little) push back
- Hiring early has helped us move fast and is a good idea when you have a clear process and a lot of [...]
Outline:
(00:29) TLDR
(01:11) Summary of our progress and activities in year 1
(02:50) Results: one year of Mieux Donner
(03:05) Meta Goals
(04:01) Fundraising Goals
(05:10) Reflections on why our first year results were so low compared to our goals
(07:20) Proxy of impact/future impact
(07:24) Progress and Key Goals
(09:58) Some data
(11:39) Learnings
(22:40) To conclude
First published:
July 13th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9iw5D6Atr6nAnpFTc/reflecting-on-one-year-of-mieux-donner-launching-the-french
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Key takeaway
We need less breadth and more depth. Much of the early growth and success of the movement at the intersection of AI, animals and digital minds has come from exchanging ideas, people and resources across these fields. We think we are now approaching a point where more specialisation and a greater focus on action will lead to the most valuable outcomes.
Aim
The aim of AI, Animals, & Digital Minds (AIADM) 2025 was to bring together leaders in AI and non-human ethics to share ideas, resources and opportunities; and to collaborate on two goals:
- Using AI to help animals now
- Making powerful AI go better for all sentient beings, regardless of species or substrate
Did we achieve our aim? Yes, we think so!
Event overview
Organised by AI for Animals, AIADM 2025 brought together almost 900 people in person and virtually across three days in [...]
Outline:
(00:16) Key takeaway
(00:39) Aim
(02:12) Event overview
(05:41) Event takeaways
(07:00) High impact and value
(07:53) Networking and collaboration
(08:43) Movement momentum and direction
(09:09) Event comparison
(10:43) Content deep dive
(10:47) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Conference speakers on AI, animals, and ethics presenting at London 2025. The image shows four conference speakers presenting at what appears to be an academic or professional conference. Each speaker is shown in their own panel with their name and presentation topic displayed above their photo. The topics focus on AI ethics, animal welfare, and the intersection of artificial intelligence with animal consciousness and welfare. The conference appears to be titled AI, Animals, & Digital Minds London 2025 based on the backdrop visible in one of the panels.
(12:13) Core tensions
(13:47) Strategic insights
(15:05) Emerging priorities
(16:02) Talks, panels & workshops
(22:01) What went well
(23:33) What could be improved for next time
(25:24) Budget
(28:37) Acknowledgements
(29:52) Get involved
(30:30) Contact
First published:
July 12th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HJg3CGW4yBxXhD9x2/ai-animals-and-digital-minds-2025-retrospective
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TLDR: On a VERY rough Sanity check[1], GiveWell's New Incentives “lived saved” numbers seem perhaps twice as high as is plausible.
On seeing this wonderful graph from a GiveWell Back-check of New Incentives, I thought to myself wow New Incentives saved 27,000 lives - that's insane but feels quite high.
So I decided to spend a surprisingly fun 90 minutes of my life doing a sanity check of a back-check. The things I do for joy...
Due to the speedrun nature, I might have got a baisc input wrong, made a simple logical mistake or calculation error. Also note that even if New Incentives did only save half, or a quarter as many lives as GiveWell estimated, they would still be a very cost-effective charity!
My Sanity Check BOTEC[2] I tried to estimate the upper end of what might be plausible, as this is only a [...]
Outline:
(01:08) My Sanity Check BOTEC
(01:19) How Many kids did New Incentives cause to be vaccinated?
(01:49) What percent of those lives would be saved by Vaccination?
(03:55) We account for the remaining Mortality
(04:15) Now we estimate Vaccine preventable deaths from what's left.
First published:
July 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FxAtFMRnJZ2dbLBhA/sanity-check-givewell-s-new-incentives-estimate-seems
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This is a link post. This seems like an important piece of work - an RCT on the use of AI capabilities for developers. The TL;DR of the paper is
The devil is in the details of course. This post by Steve Newman does a good job of working through some of them.
I have highlighted some considerations from it:
The methodology was as follows:
- METR recruited 16 developers from major open-source projects.
- Each developer selected a list of coding tasks from their todo list, breaking up large projects into tasks that they could complete in an hour or two. In all, 246 tasks were included in the study.
- The developers estimated how long it would take them to complete each task (a) under normal conditions, and (b) without using any AI tools. The percentage difference between these figures yields the predicted speedup – the degree to [...]
First published:
July 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rgBSYGBFMpKRpgHca/linkpost-metr-measuring-the-impact-of-early-2025-ai-on
Linkpost URL:
https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf
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Thank you to @Jacintha Baas, @Judith Rensing, and the @CE team for your help in editing and improving this post.
Introductory Context Hi, I’m Trish. This is my first post on the EA forum. I spent the past decade building VC-funded, high-growth startups (from pre-revenue to $10M+, from founding team to 250+ employees; pre-funding through Series B), and supporting 100s of early-stage founders through the communities at On Deck and Unreasonable Group.
Last year, I joined the team at AIM to help build the Founding to Give program, which helps people start high-impact for-profit tech startups.
AIM's Founding to Give program aims to launch for-profit startups that create impact through two ways:
- Build a startup, exit, and donate to effective charities (similar to earning to give)
- Direct positive impact created through the startup
AIM's research and Founder's Pledge data show high expected value (EV) for the [...]
Outline:
(00:18) Introductory Context
(01:33) Summary
(02:10) Overview: The Bull & Bear Case
(03:05) Reasons often given for why for-profits can't have significant impact (and their counterexamples)
(03:13) #1 You can't serve two masters
(03:56) #2 Show me a for-profit that is solving for rural malaria prevention
(05:02) #3 For profits can't solve problems for those suffering the most
(06:37) #4 But what about the perverse incentives that will inevitably emerge
(08:07) #5 It would have happened anyway
(10:24) #6 DuoLingo is designed to keep you using the app, not to deliver real learning outcomes
(11:42) Some ideas for where for-profits might be able to create significant direct impact
(13:15) Some ideas for where for-profits might be able to uniquely contribute to the impact ecosystem
(15:06) Next Steps
First published:
July 11th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Se7gdAbjHPLLnRgbf/can-for-profit-companies-create-significant-direct-impact
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This is a link post. I'm interested in a simple question: Why are people all so terrified of dying? And have people gotten more afraid? (Answer: probably yes!)
In some sense, this should be surprising: Surely people have always wanted to avoid dying? But it turns out the evidence that this preference has increased over time is quite robust.
It's an important phenomenon that has been going on for at least a century, it's relatively new, I think it underlies much of modern life, and yet pretty much nobody talks about it.
I tried to provide a evenhanded treatment of the question, with a "fox" rather than "hedgehog" outlook. In the post, I cover a range of evidence for why this might be true, including VSL, increased healthcare spending, covid lockdowns, parenting and other individual risk behaviors. Conditional upon it being true, I also consider why, drawing on evidence from [...]
First published:
July 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pbgBbjdGGMbkLGXYp/the-rising-premium-of-life
Linkpost URL:
https://linch.substack.com/p/the-rising-premium-for-life
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I think the 2003 invasion of Iraq has some interesting lessons for the future of AI policy.
(Epistemic status: I’ve read a bit about this, talked to AIs about it, and talked to one natsec professional about it who agreed with my analysis (and suggested some ideas that I included here), but I’m not an expert.)
For context, the story is:
- Iraq was sort of a rogue state after invading Kuwait and then being repelled in 1990-91. After that, they violated the terms of the ceasefire, e.g. by ceasing to allow inspectors to verify that they weren't developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). (For context, they had previously developed biological and chemical weapons, and used chemical weapons in war against Iran and against various civilians and rebels). So the US was sanctioning and intermittently bombing them.
- After the war, it became clear that Iraq actually wasn’t producing [...]
First published:
July 10th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hLWsAdhhgE88HKjKE/lessons-from-the-iraq-war-about-ai-policy
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TLDR: July 21-27 will be a themed week on the EA Forum for posting career-related quick takes and posts. We'll also have career advisors available throughout the week to answer questions.
Last time we ran a career conversations week, it led to some great posts, including:
- Mistakes, flukes, and good calls I made in my multiple careers - Catherine Low
- Who Is a Good Fit for a Career in Nonprofit Entrepreneurship? - Charity Entrepreneurship
- Monetary and social incentives in longtermist careers - Vaidehi Agarwalla
It's about time we did this again!
Alongside many great posts (which you are encouraged to write), we’ll also have a pinned “Ask Me Anything” post with career advisors throughout the week, as well as a couple of career-related debates.
Add this and future events to your Google calendarexpect this vibe on the bannerGoals As a community, we hold collective knowledge about careers that we haven’t [...]
Outline:
(01:11) Goals
(01:52) How to take part
(03:41) Next steps
First published:
July 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eoR7GnugbCXX8KEEk/career-conversations-week-july-21-27
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This is a link post. Living in New Zealand can sometimes feel like an obstacle to doing good effectively. We’re far from the EA hubs in the UK/US, and from opportunities for direct work on global health & development.
But are there any areas where we might have an advantage? Here are some possibilities that the community has been discussing recently:
- As a low-risk environment for AI training. Alethios argues that NZ's legislative environment and geothermal resources could make us a good candidate for AI data/training centres.
- As a safe zone for global catastrophic risk. Many have noted that NZ's position as an isolated island nation makes us more resilient to risks like nuclear winter and pandemics.
- As a leverage point for animal welfare. Animal Policy International chose to work in New Zealand because we have high(er) welfare standards that could be used to drive change elsewhere.
- As a [...]
First published:
July 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3JLTPFmpTDMHPX5su/what-is-nz-s-comparative-advantage
Linkpost URL:
https://effectivealtruism.nz/blog/nz-comparative-advantage
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This is a crosspost of a recent post by Hannah Yang, FP Research's comms lead, on Founders Pledge's website.
I thought it was important to post this on the Forum because it's unclear to me what people know about FP, and because I often encounter various misconceptions — the three most common being that we focus only on climate (we don't), that we're driven primarily by member interests (we're not), and that we don't move very much money (see below).
Many of the grants below are advised grants — that is, grants made by donors on our recommendation, typically using FP's infrastructure — while some come directly out of our Funds. Like many orgs, we're hoping to raise a lot more money for our managed funds in the coming years to enable greater flexibility, greater efficiency, and indeed greater impact.
More generally, though, FP is planning to roughly triple [...]
Outline:
(01:55) Global Health & Development
(02:18) $8M to Teaching at the Right Level Africa (2024)
(03:18) $6.4M to Innovation in Government Initiative (2024)
(04:22) $5M to Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (2023)
(05:22) $5M to Bandhan (2024)
(06:16) Global Catastrophic Risks
(06:49) $3M to launch IBBIS (2023)
(08:03) $1.86M to start the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab (2022)
(09:06) $2.5M for Carnegie's Averting Armageddon project (2023)
(10:14) Climate
(10:37) $4M to Clean Air Task Force (2021-2022)
(11:48) $5M to DEPLOY/US (2024)
(13:09) $3.5M to establish the Innovation Initiative (2025)
First published:
July 9th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9WinzeTqDeTBygQwK/10-of-founders-pledge-s-biggest-grants
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This is a rough explanation of relative ranges, a heuristic that I've found very helpful for quickly comparing two options that trade off between two dimensions. Consider the following examples of tradeoffs:
- Should we prioritize helping small animals or large animals? There are more small animals, but large animals have a higher capacity for suffering.
- Should we fund medical research on the most promising candidates across diseases, or should we focus only on the most important diseases? Broad search is more likely to lead to a successful treatment, but targeted search can lead to treatments for higher-burden diseases.
- If we fund a recurring health/consumption survey, should we fund it annually or quarterly? More rounds leads to higher-frequency information, but at a higher cost.
You could answer these questions by carefully quantifying the value of each parameter – the actual population of different types [...]
Outline:
(02:46) Formalization
(04:16) There are more probabilities in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy
First published:
July 9th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Mgv6d2nDMHAkLotbp/the-relative-range-heuristic
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About the program Hi! We’re Chana and Aric, from the new 80,000 Hours video program.
For over a decade, 80,000 Hours has been talking about the world's most pressing problems in newsletters, articles and many extremely lengthy podcasts.
But today's world calls for video, so we’ve started a video program[1], and we’re so excited to tell you about it!
80,000 Hours is launching AI in Context, a new YouTube channel hosted by Aric Floyd. Together with associated Instagram and TikTok accounts, the channel will aim to inform, entertain, and energize with a mix of long and shortform videos about the risks of transformative AI, and what people can do about them.
[Chana has also been experimenting with making shortform videos, which you can check out here; we’re still deciding on what form her content creation will take]
We hope to bring our own personalities and perspectives on these issues [...]
Outline:
(00:18) About the program
(01:40) Our first long-form video
(03:14) Strategy and future of the video program
(04:18) Subscribing and sharing
(04:57) Request for feedback
First published:
July 9th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ERuwFvYdymRsuWaKj/80-000-hours-is-producing-ai-in-context-a-new-youtube
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This is a link post. I donated my left kidney to a stranger on April 9, 2024, inspired by my dear friend @Quinn Dougherty (who was inspired by @Scott Alexander, who was inspired by @Dylan Matthews). By the time I woke up after surgery, it was on its way to San Francisco. When my recipient woke up later that same day, they felt better than when they went under. I'm going to talk about one complication and one consequence of my donation, but I want to be clear from the get: I would do it again in a heartbeat.
I met Quinn at an EA picnic in Brooklyn and he was wearing a shirt that I remembered as saying "I donated my kidney to a stranger and I didn't even get this t-shirt." It actually said "and all I got was this t-shirt," which isn't as funny. I went home [...]
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 9th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yHJL3qK9RRhr82xtr/my-kidney-donation
Linkpost URL:
https://cuttyshark.substack.com/p/my-kidney-donation-story
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Note: This post is written in a personal capacity. The views expressed here are our own and do not represent those of any organisation we're affiliated with. We're grateful to Bob Fischer, Tobias Leenaert, Pablo Moleman, Felix Werdermann, and Kevin Xia for their valuable input and feedback, which does not imply endorsement of the arguments presented. While we've done our best to base this post on careful research and reasoning, we don't claim to be experts on this topic. Our aim is not to assert a final conclusion, but to explore an idea we find worth discussing, and we'd be really grateful for any thoughts that might challenge or deepen our understanding.
This post explores whether eating sardines and anchovies could overall result in more good than harm and whether the consumption of these fish can be aligned with the ethics of veganism, despite departing from conventional vegan norms. [...]
Outline:
(01:35) 🥣 Health & Nutrition
(01:40) Uncertainty in Nutrition Science
(02:50) Limitations of Supplementation
(04:05) Potential Health Benefits of Fish
(06:42) 🌍 Sustainability
(06:47) Resources and Emissions
(07:44) Fish Populations
(09:31) Ecological Impacts
(10:18) 🐟 Animal Ethics
(10:21) Moral Weights
(12:34) Fishing vs. Crop Deaths
(13:21) Fishing vs. Natural Deaths
(15:25) Species Survival
(16:47) 💡 Societal Implications
(16:52) Moral Progress
(18:43) Food System Change
(19:55) 📢 Effective Advocacy
(19:59) Pragmatism vs. Purity
(21:11) Diversity vs. Unity
(22:14) 👉 Conclusion
The original text contained 29 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 8th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MvXbFB2Hhgq46toye/a-vegan-case-for-eating-sardines-and-anchovies
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1. Introduction
One of the first activities I organized in Effective Altruism 3 years ago, after I participated in the first Dutch Effective Altruism Introductory course 3.5 years ago, was a bookclub on Tobias Leenaert's book How to Create a Vegan World. The proximate cause was that this was organized earlier once by Marieke de Visscher but not again and I also wanted to participate.
I ran it 3 or 4 times and am quite enthusiastic about it, so I want to share the format here to enable (and encourage) you, or someone else, to run it too. I’ll share the program setup and then the reflection questions to guide the conversation, which Tobias Leenaert as the author provided himself and okayed sharing. Both of the Google documents were shared in full and upfront with the participants, so people knew what to expect and could prepare. And as [...]
Outline:
(00:12) 1. Introduction
(01:20) 2. Context on Organising
(01:25) 2.1: Sessions, Beforehand and Afterwards
(02:31) 2.2: Participants
(04:45) 2.3: Two equal parts build up this bookclub
(05:45) 2.4: Time-management
(08:48) 3. Impact
(10:58) 3.1: Evaluations
(12:06) 4: Program
(14:29) 5: Reflection Questions
First published:
July 7th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EdquGJC4swcAoPdZD/organising-bookclub-how-to-create-a-vegan-world
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Rethink Priorities has been conducting a range of surveys and experiments aimed at understanding how people respond to different framings of Effective Altruism (EA), Longtermism, and related specific cause areas.
There has been much debate about whether people involved in EA and Longtermism should frame their efforts and outreach in terms of Effective altruism, Longtermism, Existential risk, Existential security, Global priorities research, or by only mentioning specific risks, such as AI safety and Pandemic prevention (examples can be found at the following links: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8). These discussions have taken place almost entirely in the absence of empirical data, even though they concern largely empirical questions.[1]
In this post we report the results of three pilot studies examining responses to different EA-related terms and descriptions. Some initial findings are:
- Longtermism appears to be consistently less popular than other EA-related terms and concepts we examined, whether presented just as a [...]
Outline:
(01:52) Study 1. Cause area framing
(05:40) Demographics
(08:12) Study 2. EA-related concepts with and without descriptions
(12:51) Demographics
(13:31) Study 3. Preferences for concrete causes or more general ideas/movements
(17:35) Demographics
(18:07) Manifold Market Predictions
(19:20) General discussion
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 18 images which were described by AI.
First published:
November 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qagZoGrxbD7YQRYNr/testing-framings-of-ea-and-longtermism
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Overview
With Marginal Funding Week, we want to share key updates on the EA Animal Welfare Fund (AWF). We'll cover what we've accomplished so far in 2024, our impact this year, recent changes, and where we're headed next - including current constraints to our impact. We think this info will be helpful for anyone considering year-end donations.
Since its founding in 2017, AWF has distributed $23.3M across 347 grants. This year, we’ve distributed $3.7M across 51 grants. We made grants across multiple intervention categories and aimed to impact a variety of species. Our most frequently funded strategic area was welfare campaigns, policy advocacy and research. The most frequently targeted species were egg-laying hens followed by multiple farmed animals, wild animals, and shrimps.
While the impact of many of our 2024 grants is still unclear, our previous grants have made significant progress, reflecting our ability to identify opportunities with [...]
Outline:
(00:08) Overview
(02:12) 1. Background
(03:43) 2. A year in review
(03:47) Key Numbers and Reach
(04:14) Grant Distribution
(05:27) By intervention type
(06:25) By species
(09:04) Highlighted Grants
(13:36) 3. Organizational updates
(18:47) 4. Future plans
(21:58) 5. Room for more funding
The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.
First published:
November 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pZhqWRiq9ubaMSnqx/ea-animal-welfare-fund-2024-review-changes-and-plans
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I work for CEA, but this post isn’t intended as a fundraising post for CEA. The main beneficiaries I want to direct readers to are e.g. EA groups and EA communicators who might not have capacity for fundraising. I expect similar arguments apply to e.g. AIS, rationality and animal welfare community-building efforts but I know those spaces less well. There's a version of this post where I pull actual donation numbers and iron out the details of what I’m proposing but this is not that version.
It's difficult for funders to figure out which community-building efforts are successful. The reason your inbox is littered with surveys for every event, retreat and course you take part in is because we want to know if they’re working, and, ultimately, whether we should continue using EA resources to run them. Roughly, things work like this:
- Community builders (CBs) help new community [...]
Outline:
(03:56) Some caveats
(04:39) What next?
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
November 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DyTph8eJXDvnqDhXc/consider-donating-to-whoever-helped-you
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Key Takeaways
- Optimizing your giving's effect on "EA's portfolio” implies you should fund the causes your value system thinks are most underfunded by EA's largest allocators (e.g. Open Phil and SFF).
- These causes aren't necessarily your value system's most preferred causes. ("Preferred" = the ones you'd allocate the plurality of EA's resources to.)
- For the typical EA, this would likely imply donating more to animal welfare, which is currently heavily underfunded under the typical EA's value system.
- Opportunities Open Phil is exiting from, including invertebrates, digital minds, and wild animals, may be especially impactful.
Alice's Investing Dilemma: A Thought Experiment
Alice is a conservative investor who prefers the risk-adjusted return of a portfolio of 70% stocks and 30% bonds. Along with 9 others, Alice has been allocated $1M to split between stocks and bonds however she sees fit. The combined $10M portfolio will be held for 10 years, and its [...]
Outline:
(00:07) Key Takeaways
(00:53) Alices Investing Dilemma: A Thought Experiment
(01:55) In Charity, We Should Optimize The Portfolio of Everyones Actions
(03:09) Theoretical Implications
(03:31) The Portfolio of Everyones Actions vs EAs Portfolio
(04:10) Practical Recommendations
(05:26) EAs Current Resource Allocations
First published:
November 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2G8XfzKyd78JqZpjQ/fund-causes-open-phil-underfunds-instead-of-your-most
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TLDR: The shortest version of this argument is very simple: your expectations for an organization should be higher where their budget and staff size are higher. In other words, we should have different expectations for a 20-person organization with a $1 million budget than a 2-person $100,000 budget organization.
While this seems pretty clear in the abstract, I find that people tend not to update nearly enough on this when they should. For example, I often see people comparing the total research output of two organizations, yet when I ask about it, they will not know the yearly budget or staff size of either. This is a big problem. As a movement, we want to support efficient and effective organizations, not just organizations that are the biggest, most salient or currently the highest funded.
Budgets and staff
When considering how impressive an organization's output is, one [...]
Outline:
(00:58) Budgets and staff
(02:46) Comparative size
(04:45) Why this matters
First published:
November 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5wXGLbqQ3cchjogB5/expectations-scale-with-scale-we-should-be-more-scope
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Warning: This post discusses statistics about extreme pain that may be distressing. While cluster headaches are a neglected, high-impact issue, understanding their true burden requires appreciating the intensity of suffering involved. The pain often reaches levels far beyond typical human experience, making subjective accounts a valuable datapoint until we have robust methods for quantifying pain intensity. For further context, links to firsthand accounts are provided in the footnote[1].
You no longer have a headache, or pain located at a particular site: you are literally plunged into the pain, like in a swimming pool. There is only one thing that remains of you: your agitated lucidity and the pain that invades everything, takes everything. There is nothing but pain. At that point, you would give everything, including your head, your own life, to make it stop.
- Yves, cluster headache patient from France (from Rossi et al., 2018)
Key [...]
Outline:
(01:11) Key takeaways
(03:57) 1. Introduction
(04:00) 1.1. Clinical Features and Pain Comparisons
(07:22) 1.2. Treatment and Prevention
(10:02) 1.3. The Heavy-Tailed Valence Hypothesis and Existing Metrics
(14:49) 1.4. Goal
(16:14) 2. Methods
(17:43) 2.1 Prevalence
(19:17) 2.2 Frequency
(22:21) 2.3 Duration
(23:53) 2.4 Intensity
(25:58) 2.5 Burden Metrics
(29:01) 3. Results
(29:10) 3.1. Global Burden of Cluster Headache Pain
(32:05) 3.2. Reweighting of Extreme Pain
(39:41) 3.3. Ceiling Effects
(43:34) 4. Recommendations and Conclusions
(48:31) Acknowledgements
The original text contained 26 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
November 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/geh2g2nKb7Kkp26ze/quantifying-the-global-burden-of-extreme-pain-from-cluster
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The failure rate is not 0
The base rate of failure for startups is not 0: Of the 6000 companies Y Combinator has funded, only ~16 are public. This is the wrong reference class for FTX at a $32b valuation, but even amongst extremely valuable companies, failures are not uncommon:
- WeWork had a peak valuation of $47b
- Theranos had a peak valuation of $10b
- Lucid Motors had a peak valuation of $90b
- Virgin Galactic had a peak valuation of $14b
- Jull had a peak valuation of $38b
- Bolt had a peak valuation of $11b
- Magic Leap had a peak valuation of $13b
That is only a handful of cases, but the reference class for startups worth over $10b is also pretty small. Maybe 45 private companies and another ~100 that have gone public. I'm playing pretty fast and loose here because the exact number isn't important, the odds [...]
Outline:
(00:04) The failure rate is not 0
(03:54) Why does risk matter?
(06:45) Looking back from today
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First published:
October 31st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/f5YfiCrunAHFeDpSQ/what-i-wish-i-had-said-about-ftx
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Summary
The written word dominates EA discourse but visuals have a unique power in communicating ideas that seems quite underleveraged in this community. As a designer and communicator in the space, I wanted to share some of the presentations and visualizations I’ve created over the years in hopes that they might be helpful to others. My goal isn't to present these visuals as "ready-to-use" resources—for various reasons they're not ready (see disclaimers)—but rather as references that hopefully inspire others to create and invest in visual forms of communication.
Effective Giving 101 (2023)
In 2023, when I was director of design at Giving What We Can, we were invited to give a talk at Microsoft about effective giving. We normally don’t dive so deep into the research that undergirds our recommendations but—given the highly-educated, highly-analytical audience at Microsoft—I thought it could be compelling to actually get into the weeds and [...]
Outline:
(00:16) Summary
(00:50) Effective Giving 101 (2023)
(01:53) Full deck: Doing Good Better (Microsoft 2023)
(02:00) GiveWell's 2020 analysis of AMF
(02:58) Slides: GiveWell's 2020 analysis of AMF
(03:15) Global income illustration
(04:53) Slides: The Global Income Distribution
(05:09) Prioritization in GCR (2024)
(05:56) Parfit's 99% extinction hypothetical
(06:56) Slides: Parfit's 99% v 100%
(07:13) Mapping the GCR landscape
(08:54) Slides: Visualizing: The GCR Landscape
(09:13) Bonus: Effective Giving Strategy Frameworks
(10:20) Vision to Vectors
(10:23) Slides: Vision to Vectors
(10:39) The Pledger Journey
(10:42) Slides: The Pledger Journey
The original text contained 8 images which were described by AI.
First published:
October 31st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GuFxEPcn7rzz4pDhw/visualizing-ea-ideas
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I became the CEO of EV US in January 2023. I worked alongside the EV US and UK teams, former EV UK CEO Howie Lempel, and current EV UK CEO Rob Gledhill to recover and reform Effective Ventures and improve the robustness of the EA ecosystem in the aftermath of FTX's collapse. Amidst these efforts, I and others learned or fortified lessons that I think aren’t unique to EV and could be valuable to the wider EA community. Being able to look at hard problems, discuss them with candor, and update based on what we learn are values that I admire, and I see them as a positive and necessary mechanism for doing good. I want to act on those values here.
Goals of this post
- Provide an update to create communal knowledge: Clarify what reforms have taken place at EV in recent years and the reasoning behind [...]
Outline:
(00:50) Goals of this post
(01:48) Some high-level notes on FTX-related reflection
(06:04) Scope of this post
(11:53) Summary of reforms and actions taken at EV
(14:54) Background on EV
(18:42) Reforms and other actions taken
(18:46) Hiring CEOs (and other non-board personnel) for EV US and EV UK
(24:00) Changes to EV US and EV UK board
(30:04) FTX-related investigations
(38:43) Instituting financial reforms
(41:23) Improving donor due diligence
(45:36) Adopting a restrictive communications policy
(57:19) Streamlining whistleblowing policies
(59:44) Updating anti-harassment and misconduct policies
(01:03:04) Improving the COI policy
(01:06:22) Clarifying the level of separation between the EV US and EV UK entities
(01:10:44) Initiating EV shut down
(01:15:11) Some of the lessons EA can learn from the EV experience
(01:15:31) Brief summary of these lessons
(01:16:10) The lessons
(01:16:14) Organizational governance and compliance can have serious implications
(01:17:08) It's important to carefully think through and explicitly communicate your organizational risk strategy, and pay attention to it as your organization develops. This is particularly true for a fiscal sponsor
(01:19:10) EA organizations often underrate experience relative to “intelligence” and “value alignment”
(01:22:09) Vetting external counsel is important
(01:23:02) Crisis prep is underrated relative to crisis response
(01:24:43) Invest in capacity building early
(01:26:34) Communicate early (and have the resources to do so)
(01:27:31) Acknowledgments
(01:29:12) Appendix: other content about and reflections on FTX on the EA Forum
(01:29:47) Information
(01:31:24) Reflections
(01:33:18) Investigation-related
(01:33:55) Statements
The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
October 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AuSah98NtR5qv8zQA/reflections-and-lessons-from-effective-ventures-1
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We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve the lives of chickens raised for food in the UK.
Tomorrow, The Humane League UK (THL UK) will be heading to the High Court to challenge the legality of fast-growing breeds of chicken- Frankenchickens. At stake are the lives of one billion animals.
Our small team will be demonstrating outside the courts tomorrow morning. Inside, our legal team, Advocates for Animals, will be arguing that farming Frankenchickens breaches the Welfare of Farmed Animals (England) Regulations 2007.
We are up against huge opposition with The Government, the British Poultry Council, and the National Farmers’ Union representing the interests of the £3 billion poultry industry. This really is a David versus Goliath case.
If you are interested in the legal intricacies of the hearing itself, you can watch a livestream of proceedings here on both Wednesday and Thursday. You can also [...]
Outline:
(00:05) We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve the lives of chickens raised for food in the UK.
(01:17) Frankenchickens
(01:59) THL UKs three-year legal battle
(03:09) The fight continues
(04:14) Our chances of success
(05:44) Support The Humane League UK
(06:01) The Humane League UK
(06:56) Our vision is that by 2050, weve stopped the worst and most widespread abuse of animals raised for food, and they’re treated with far greater compassion.
First published:
October 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qCMC4cnWCi7yjcnCZ/tomorrow-we-fight-for-the-future-of-one-billion-chickens
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I'd like to thank Derek Shiller from Rethink priorities for extensive discussions and looking over this post.
Introduction
I've been following the "animal welfare" debate this week on the EA forum, and noticed that a key crux for a lot of people was that calculations showed that animal welfare campaigns (specifically the "caged chicken corporate campaign") was much more cost effective than a human global health development project like the against malaria foundation.
But while most estimates agreed that AW was more effective than GHD, I noticed there was a wide discrepancy in how much more effective it was. Vasco Grilo claimed it was 1500 times better. This report by Laura Duffy of rethink priorities (when you convert from order of magnitude to real numbers in table 1) claimed it was about 60 times better. Whereas if you go the Cross cause comparison website, also by RP, and [...]
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qARKFgYhCqmKB2YpF/explaining-the-discrepancies-in-cost-effectiveness-ratings-a
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EA Nigeria Summit was the first EA-related conference in Nigeria, and it took place from September 6th to 7th, 2024. The event saw a higher level of interest than we (the organisers) expected. We received applications from individuals across Nigeria and the international community, especially Africans. We accepted 170 applicants for the summit, and a total of 136 participants attended the event.
The summit provided an opportunity for the attendees to connect, network, and share ideas and practices, paving the way for potential collaboration and impactful actions at the cost of USD 179.6 per attendee.
Some Key Specifics
Location - Chida Event Centre, Utako, Abuja, Nigeria.
Applications received - 472, (18 applications were duplicates)
Admitted applicants - 170
Confirmed attendees - 137
Number of speakers - 14
Total Expenses - USD 24,611
Cost per attendee - 179.6 USD
The first EA-aligned conference in Nigeria!
We [...]
Outline:
(01:03) Some Key Specifics
(01:39) The first EA-aligned conference in Nigeria!
(02:37) Summit Goal and Strategy
(04:19) Attendees and Experience
(07:18) Budgeting and Finances
(10:14) Content
(11:40) Production and Logistics
(12:02) Dealing with Vendors:
(12:28) Securing the Summit Venue:
(13:26) Video Production and Photography
(14:00) Printing
(14:31) Logistics (Summit Day 1 and 2)
(15:19) Communication and Event Tech
(16:26) Some Additional Brief
(17:12) Core Team and Volunteers
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 6 images which were described by AI.
First published:
October 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xyGYuoP8EfXmirdZg/retrospective-on-ea-nigeria-summit-our-successes-and
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Foreword
Sadly, it looks like the debate week will end without many of the stronger[1] arguments for Global Health being raised, at least at the post level. I don't have time to write them all up, and in many cases they would be better written by someone with more expertise, but one issue is firmly in my comfort zone: the maths!
The point I raise here is closely related to the Two Envelopes Problem, which has been discussed before. I think some of this discussion can come across as 'too technical', which is unfortunate since I think a qualitative understanding of the issue is critical to making good decisions when under substantial uncertainty. In this post I want to try and demystify it.
This post was written quickly, and has a correspondingly high chance of error, for which I apologise. I am confident in the core point, and [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Foreword
(00:59) Two envelopes: the EA version
(02:59) What just happened?
(04:17) Some implications
(05:27) Global Health vs. Animal Welfare
(07:28) Conclusion
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/atdmkTAnoPMfmHJsX/multiplier-arguments-are-often-flawed
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I really loved this quick take from Lizka, especially this part:
At the same time, trying to actually do anything is really hard.[4] Appreciation for doers is often undersupplied. Being in leadership positions or engaging in public discussions is a valuable service, but opens you up to a lot of (often stressful) criticism, which acts as a disincentive for being public. Psychological safety is important in teams (and communities), so it's unfortunate that critical environments lead more people to feel like they would be judged harshly for potential mistakes. Not all criticism is useful enough to be worth engaging with (or sharing). Responding to criticism can be time-consuming or otherwise costly and isn’t always worth it.[5] Sometimes people who are sharing “criticism” hate the project for reasons that aren’t what's explicitly stated, or just want to vent or build themselves up.[6]
A lot of communities I've been part of-- [...]
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tuSQBGgnoxvsXwXJ3/criticism-is-sanctified-in-ea-but-like-any-intervention
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In summary, there are two important reasons why I believe it's more important to direct additional resources towards animal welfare over global health:
- Global health and human welfare are generally improving whilst animal suffering is getting worse at a worrying (and potentially accelerating) rate. For factory farming, the default is it gets worse and worse over the next 50 years. In my view, it's still unclear if we’ll end factory farming and we’re competing with a very powerful incumbent industry to make it happen. I don’t believe the same trajectory is true for global health.
- Animal welfare is orders of magnitude more neglected on most important metrics: Philanthropic funding, government funding or great people working on the issue.
These reasons aren’t necessarily all that is required to think it would be better to spend an additional $100M on animal welfare relative to global health (see the 80,000 Hours [...]
The original text contained 10 images which were described by AI.
First published:
October 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QbRFwPks5nFLK8i2W/the-default-trajectory-for-animal-welfare-means-vastly-more
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For many years, I devoted myself to improving human health and wellbeing. But then I shifted to working to prevent suffering for animals. In this post, I will briefly share some considerations that pushed me to make this change.
Violence
The phrase ‘animal welfare’ can sound pretty calm and gentle.
But when we talk about ‘animal welfare’, we are usually talking about preventing direct, brutal, physical violence against sentient beings.
Animals in the food system are brutalised, beaten, confined, stabbed, castrated, cut, boiled alive, dragged, gassed, asphyxiated, separated from their mothers/children, violated, skinned.
Imagine being castrated, with no anaesthetic. Having your throat slit while you are still conscious. Violated, and forcibly inseminated. Being crammed into a tiny, tiny space for days on end, where you can’t stretch your limbs, or turn around. Skinned alive.
There is something so…brutal, maximalist, harsh, extreme about the intense physical violence that we [...]
First published:
October 10th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RZEvk6cBtBg2mpgwS/trigger-warning-violence-animal-vs-human-welfare-sharing
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Intro
Suppose you have $100M to give away. You are drawn to the many important opportunities to reduce animal suffering or address pressing issues in global health and development. Your choice about how to allocate the funds could depend on considerations like these:
- Moral values: How much moral weight do you assign to various non-human species? Are you focused exclusively on hedonic considerations, like reducing suffering? Or do you have other relevant values, such as autonomy?
- Cost-effectiveness estimates: Species-discounting aside, how many DALYs/$ do the best projects in the area achieve? How fast do returns diminish in these areas?
- Decision-theoretic values: How do you feel about risk-taking? Are you willing to tolerate a substantial probability that projects will fail? What about non-trivial chances of projects backfiring?
- Second-order effects: Will giving to one cause set benefit any of your other values? Are there speculative benefits that might flow from [...]
Outline:
(00:09) Intro
(02:47) Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model
(02:51) How it works
(04:25) What it says
(06:53) Portfolio Builder Tool
(06:57) How it works
(08:12) What it says
(10:32) Moral Parliament Tool
(10:36) How it works
(11:48) What it says
(12:02) Parliament composition matters
(14:10) Allocation strategy matters
(17:27) Conclusions
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 11 images which were described by AI.
First published:
October 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vEwGx9RXnHaMyKhZM/what-do-rp-s-tools-tell-us-about-giving-usd100m-to-aw-or-ghd
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TLDR: I’ve recently started as a “Research Fellow” at Forethought (focusing on how we should prepare for a potential period of explosive growth and related questions).
I left my role on the CEA Online Team, but I still love the Forum (and the Forum/CEA/mod teams) and plan on continuing to be quite active here. I’m also staying on the moderation team as an advisor.
➡️ If you were planning on reaching out to me about something Forum- or Online-related, you should probably reach out to Toby Tremlett or email forum@effectivealtruism.org.
What's in this post?
I had some trouble writing this announcement; I felt like I should post something, but didn’t know what to include or how to organize the post. In the end, I decided to write down and share assorted reflections on my time at CEA, and not really worry about putting everything into a cohesive frame or [...]
Outline:
(00:44) What's in this post?
(02:17) Briefly: more context on the change
(03:45) A note on EA and CEA
(04:32) Assorted notes from my time at CEA
(04:37) Some things about working at CEA that I probably wouldn’t have predicted
(04:44) 1. Working with a manager and working in a team have been some of the best ways for me to grow.
(05:33) 2. I like CEA's team values and principles a lot more than I expected to. (And I want to import many of them wherever I go.)
(08:39) 3. A huge number of people I worked and interacted with are incredibly generous and compassionate, and this makes a big difference.
(10:40) Some things about my work at CEA that were difficult for me
(10:46) 1. My work was pretty public. This has some benefits, and also some real downsides.
(12:31) 2. Many people seem confused about what CEA does, and seemed to assume incorrect things about me because I was a CEA staff member.
(14:58) 3. My job involved working on or maintaining many different projects, which made it difficult for me to focus on any single thing or make progress on proactive projects.
(16:03) 4. Despite taking little of my time, moderation was quite draining for me.
(18:26) Looking back on my work
(23:08) Thank you!
The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SPZv8ygwSPtkzo7ta/announcing-my-departure-from-cea-and-sharing-assorted-notes
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This is a link post. This post was inspired by a week of working from Ambitious Impact's office in London, and chatting with several of the startup charities there. While my experience is in the for-profit world, I think it's applicable to entrepreneurs working on impact-driven endeavors in lower-income places, both for-profit and non-profit. (Acknowledging that much of this advice will be obvious to entrepreneurs from lower-income countries; I am mostly writing for readers who like me are from high-income countries.)
On Speed and Focus
- Speed is critical. The faster you can get through the earlier stages, the higher chance you have to succeed.
- Early stage endeavors are fragile, and frequently fail when the founders decide to give up---getting bored because progress is slow, not learning much and feeling behind in your career, running low on funds to pay yourself because you took too long [...]
Outline:
(00:36) On Speed and Focus
(01:28) On Learning Things By Going Places And Talking To People
(02:21) On Regulation
(04:00) On Product
First published:
September 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vDwbwKevXqLbSmNoJ/startup-advice-targeting-low-and-middle-income-countries
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I recently had a conversation with a teammate that made me reflect on a possible cultural issue within the EA community. This teammate had expressed in a few meetings that they wanted to take on various new projects and expand their scope of responsibility. As their manager, I wanted to have Alliance Mentality to support them where possible. However, from my perspective, a slightly more tightly scoped role was probably a bit better for the team: their core responsibilities are vital for the team (and for what it's worth, when I try to do them, I'm much worse at them!).
During our recent one-on-one, realized that we both preferred the more tightly scoped role. More importantly, we uncovered that they had internalized a cultural norm from EA that people needed to be constantly changing or expanding their roles to be doing a good job.
I wanted to write a [...]
Outline:
(00:58) The Pressure to Change Roles
(01:42) The Value of Steady Hands
(02:38) Shifting the Narrative
First published:
September 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Q3DbyrFjqED9Y5Rz3/appreciating-stable-support-roles-at-ea-orgs
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This is a link post. Note: this is a new article I've written for 80,000 Hours making the case that understanding the moral status of digital minds is a pressing world problem. It's written for a general audience rather than the typical forum reader, but it may still serve as a useful introduction to the area for many.
We don't currently rank this issue among our top problems, because it's an emerging challenge without a full field devoted to it. We have a lot of remaining uncertainties about it as a problem area. But we think working on it could potentially be competitively impactful to work on our top problems for people with the right personal fit.
We welcome feedback on the article in the comments below or through our site's feedback form.
“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.”
Those words were produced [...]
Outline:
(03:04) Summary
(03:50) Our overall view
(05:25) Why might understanding the moral status of digital minds be an especially pressing problem?
(05:32) 1. Humanity may soon grapple with many AI systems that could be conscious
(11:35) Clearing up common misconceptions
(13:27) 2. Creating digital minds could go very badly — or very well
(19:02) 3. We don’t know how to assess the moral status of AI systems
(32:50) The strongest case for the possibility of sentient digital minds: whole brain emulation
(36:37) 4. The scale of this issue might be enormous
(43:53) 5. Work on this problem is neglected but seems tractable
(52:52) Summing up so far
(53:49) Arguments against the moral status of digital minds as a pressing problem
(54:10) Two key cruxes
(55:10) Take concrete next steps
(57:12) Aim for key roles
(01:00:32) Where to work
(01:01:44) Support this field in other ways
(01:02:44) Important considerations if you work on this problem
(01:03:50) Learn more
(01:03:53) Podcasts
(01:04:20) Research
The original text contained 8 images which were described by AI.
First published:
September 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jnxkjzR8hxyaEHCv6/is-understanding-the-moral-status-of-digital-minds-a
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This is a link post. The Democrat decided to reject the measure because it applies only to the biggest and most expensive AI models and doesn’t take into account whether they are deployed in high-risk situations, he said in his veto message.
Smaller models sometimes handle critical decision-making involving sensitive data, such as electrical grids and medical records, while bigger models at times handle low-risk activities such as customer service.
First published:
September 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zRyFGJPnHWoF2nizs/gavin-newsom-vetoes-sb-1047
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This is a link post. Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good—by Sam Arnold, Jason Brennan, Ryan Davis, and me—is now available from Routledge. It introduces a new “roundtable” format for debate books: each of us chose three questions relating to beneficence, wrote a “starter essay” on our own questions, wrote responses to each of the others’ starter essays, and then wrote a wrap-up response to the responses. The result is a lot of constructive engagement between our different viewpoints. I hope it's as edifying to the reader as it was for me as an author!
As a nice bonus, the publisher has allowed me to publicly share some of my contributions to the volume (my introduction & starter essays, plus three of my responses to others’ questions). My plan is to share one essay a week on my substack, starting with the introduction today. If you’re [...]
Outline:
(01:20) Series contents
(02:04) Introduction: Three Questions Exploring Beneficence
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
September 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oiSzAtFEEmjncsAto/questioning-beneficence-four-philosophers-on-effective
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This week, Open Phil launched the Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF) and became a founding partner of the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future (PLF). Given the interest around these initiatives, I thought people might be interested in an AMA.
I currently oversee Open Phil's grantmaking on lead exposure, and have been fortunate to contribute to some of the recent exciting developments.
For more context, here are some resources:
- Blog post announcing the Lead Exposure Action Fund
- An op-ed on lead exposure in the Washington Post, co-authored by Alexander Berger and Administrator Samantha Power
- The Lead Exposure Action Fund website
- A video of the PLF launch, featuring Jill Biden, the heads of UNICEF, UNEP, WHO, the World Bank, USAID, and three heads of state.
A bit more about me:
- I’ve been with Open Phil for about 2.5 years, after spending six years at GiveWell and a year with [...]
First published:
September 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/spTeNt4ebbJnGvzAi/ama-james-snowden-open-philanthropy
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Dear EA Community,
I’m thrilled to announce that I have recently been appointed as the Director of Research at Plateau State University (PLASU), Nigeria. This is an exciting opportunity to lead and foster research development, build capacity, and encourage innovation across various fields. As someone deeply committed to impactful research, I see this role as a platform to expand and enhance the research ecosystem both locally and globally.
My Vision:In this leadership role, my key focus areas will include:
Strengthening Research Capacity:I will prioritize running workshops, training programs, and mentorship initiatives for postgraduate students and early-career researchers to help them navigate the complexities of academia and build their research skills.
Fostering Collaborative Research:I aim to create opportunities for collaboration with global research communities, institutions, and experts, particularly in areas like health, climate resilience, agriculture, and education, to tackle critical global and local challenges.
[...]
First published:
September 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ggwp8e4cvdSrJ8moH/exciting-news-my-new-role-and-the-path-forward-for-research
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An XKCD Petrov Day comic. On the 26th of September, each year, we celebrate Petrov day.
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Force, working at Oko, the Soviet missile defence program. On this day in 1983, during a night shift, Petrov was on duty when his monitor alerted him of a missile inbound from the US. He froze.
"The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word 'launch' on it," he says. (source: BBC News interview)
More missile warnings came in. It was Petrov's job to trust the computer system and relay its message up the command chain. If he had, the USSR would likely have started a retaliatory strike on the US.
But Petrov knew the computer system, and doubted that a true missile warning would have passed through [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EEfWMKusSfKTwzWRk/petrov-day-2024-what-is-a-petrovian-virtue
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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About The Event
CEEALAR (https://ceealar.org), née EA Hotel, is making the AI Winter we want to see in the world. Our very first ‘AI Winter’ season is now happening at our coliving/coworking hub in Blackpool, UK where we can host up to 30 people.
The season will last until end of January, and over that time we're looking to host a mix of grantees (individuals and teams) from each of the 'core' domains of AI Safety - technical research, conceptual research, governance/policy, outreach and field building.
We imagine some people will be staying with us for more or less the whole season (or longer! Our max stay is 12 months), while others will be staying for weeks or days to participate in smaller projects, hackathons or unconferences.
Our goal is to provide a critical mass of concentrated activity, workshops, bootcamps, in an environment with high potential for serendipitous [...]
Outline:
(00:03) About The Event
(01:05) About Us
(01:33) Interested?
(01:44) YOU CAN MAKE AI WINTER HAPPEN
First published:
September 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfn2MMEmpnGjTWpAw/ai-winter-season-at-ea-hotel
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Hi all! I'm creating a deep dive podcast episode about (the original) Leverage Research (for my podcast, Clearer Thinking). If you worked at (or currently work at) Leverage, or you have had experiences connected to Leverage, and you would like to either potentially:
(1) do an interview for the podcast
(2) talk to me totally off the record about your experiences (i.e., with your privacy totally protected)
Please reach out privately by using my contact form here. Or you can email our podcast (but multiple team members who work on the podcast will see it) here:
I have known many people involved in Leverage over the years (from its founding to the present day), and so I have heard a great deal of information about it from others. But I've never been a member of it, and there are still many things I don't know about it.
The [...]
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
September 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sybWX8toE9zobnhiX/i-m-creating-a-deep-dive-podcast-episode-about-the-original
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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TLDR: We made a retreat which was not funded but was paid by attendees. We managed to find a very nice place very affordably, and the organization was quite light for quite nice results. We'd encourage other clubs to consider whether they could make meet-ups (either within the country or between countries) which are light on ops, don't require funding, but are a meaningful time for attendees.
In August 2024, EA Serbia and EA Hungary organized a self-funded, three-day EA Serbia retreat, bringing together 17 participants from 6 countries: Serbia, Romania, Hungary, and further afield, including Russia, Kenya, and Spain.
The retreat aimed to make and strengthen connections across regional EA communities, allowing participants to collaborate, exchange ideas, and engage deeply with the movement's core principles, as well as learn from how things are done in other countries.
The event was hosted at Majkin Salaš, an ethno venue [...]
Outline:
(01:42) Cost and Logistics:
(02:05) Program and Structure:
(03:04) What went well:
(03:53) What could have been better:
(05:02) Highlights for Other EA Communities to Consider:
(06:41) Next Steps and Future Plans:
The original text contained 4 images which were described by AI.
First published:
September 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kEDpDqt8SowH6u3PY/reflections-on-the-second-ea-serbia-hungary-subotica-retreat
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. This WaPo piece announces the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future (PLF), a collaboration led by Open Philanthropy, USAID, and UNICEF. It was co-authored by Alexander Berger (Open Phil's CEO) and Samantha Power, head of USAID.
Ten years ago, when residents of Flint, Mich., were exposed to toxic levels of lead in their drinking water, 1 in 20 children in the city had elevated blood lead levels that placed them at risk for heart disease, strokes, cognitive deficits and developmental delays — health effects that residents still grapple with to this day. It was only after activists rallied, organized and advocated relentlessly that national attention focused on Flint, and officials committed nearly half a billion dollars to clean up Flint's water.
Today, there is a lead poisoning crisis raging on a far greater scale — and hardly anyone is talking about it.
[...]
The partnership will [...]
First published:
September 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/soeJ4XNnLoyWpiFsK/we-can-protect-millions-of-kids-from-a-global-killer-without
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This is a link post. One of Open Philanthropy's goals for this year is to experiment with collaborating with other funders. Today, we’re excited to announce our biggest collaboration to date: the Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF).
Lead exposure in low- and middle-income countries is a devastating but highly neglected issue. The Global Burden of Disease study estimates 1.5 million deaths per year attributable to lead poisoning. Despite this burden, lead poisoning has only received roughly $15 million per year in philanthropic funding until recently. That is less than 1% of the funding that goes towards diseases like tuberculosis or malaria, which are themselves considered neglected. The goal of LEAF is to accelerate progress toward a world free of lead exposure by making grants to support measurement, mitigation, and mainstreaming awareness of the problem.
Our partners have already committed $104 million, and we plan for LEAF to allocate that [...]
Outline:
(01:54) Why we chose to work on lead
(04:54) What LEAF hopes to achieve
(05:30) The LEAF team
(06:01) An experiment for Open Philanthropy
(06:49) Grantmaking so far
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z5PvTSa54pdxxw72W/announcing-the-lead-exposure-action-fund
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Intro
I think the 80,000 Hours Podcast is a great show. Despite the world of podcasts overflowing with content to choose from, it's reliably been a high-quality production that's been a regular part of my listening habits ever since I discovered it. It was also probably one of the first routes I become more aware of the EA community, which I suspect I might not be alone by.[1]
So, as the podcast numbers ticked up, the vague idea to write up a post shouting out some of my favourite episodes took root. I didn't get far with it from there, and now the unreasonable effectiveness of the 80k podcast production team has forced my hand! So in the post I'm going to link to my 10 favourite episodes, along with some final thoughts at the end.
I hope to share with you some of my favourite episodes, but I [...]
Outline:
(00:07) Intro
(01:12) My Top 10
(01:16) 10-4
(01:19) 10: #144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of the fundamental phenomena in our universe
(01:54) 9: #175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child
(02:26) 8: #139 – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
(03:00) 7: #153 – Elie Hassenfeld on two big picture critiques of GiveWells approach, and six lessons from their recent work
(03:39) 6: #129 – Dr James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination
(04:15) 5: #185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals
(05:00) 4: #67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
(05:40) Top 3
(05:43) 3: #43 – Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, and how they could be dismantled
(06:22) 2: #145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasnt inevitable
(07:07) 1: #100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome
(07:51) Final Thoughts
(07:54) Honourable Mentions
(08:10) #52 – Glen Weyl on radical institutional reforms that make capitalism and democracy work better, and how to get them
(08:52) #116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all
(09:29) #190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious
(09:59) But JWS, where are the AI episodes?
(12:03) Epilogue
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C8HWX3XsoB3krSkbm/my-top-10-picks-from-200-episodes-of-the-80k-podcast
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This is a link post. It's a rare privilege to lead an organisation that embodies the very ideals that shaped your life. I’ve been fortunate to have been given that opportunity for the last four years.
My journey with Giving What We Can began long before I became its CEO. Like many members, I started as a curious onlooker, lurking for many years after first googling something along the lines of “what's the best charity?” and slowly being drawn to the idea of effective giving. I vividly remember the day I first hovered over the ‘donate’ button on the Against Malaria Foundation's website after getting my first raise. My heart was racing, wondering if a decent chunk of my small paycheck would truly make a difference… only to go back and read a report on malaria “just one more time.”
Finally, I found the courage to act. I started giving [...]
First published:
September 10th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RkWWpYCnBgYHtisem/stepping-down-from-gwwc-so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the
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This is a link post. Summary
- During the last four years, our work for animals in Anima International faced several big challenges.
- I took on the role of Executive Director to help cement the foundations of the organization.
- Now that we want to build on these foundations to achieve even more impact for animals, we need different skills at the helm.
- Anima International leadership has appointed Jakub Stencel as the new Interim Executive Director.
- I have moved from the role of Executive Director to that of President.
After four years as Executive Director of Anima International, I pushed for my colleague Jakub Stencel to take over the role at the beginning of July. No, I’m not off chasing new opportunities or planning a quiet retreat. I’m not taking time off to be with my family (possibly my family are breathing a sigh of relief right now) And no [...]
The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.
First published:
September 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/M9XCb4qExjceFGkXx/i-have-stepped-aside-from-my-role-as-executive-director
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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Summary: A blog post circulating among EAs points out that recent presidential elections have been decided by fewer than 100,000 votes. It may be tempting to conclude that each extra vote in a swing state has a 1-in-100,000 chance of changing the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. In this post, I explain why this is not the case. I estimate the actual number to be 1-in-3 million for a vote in Pennsylvania (the most important swing state) and 1-in-6 million for a generic "swing state vote". This has important implications for people who are deciding whether to donate to efforts to change the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Introduction
Like most readers of this forum, I want Kamala Harris to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election. I also think that electoral politics as a cause area is underrated by EAs, and in 2020 I wrote a [...]
Outline:
(00:49) Introduction
(05:29) Part 1: The MTLA quote doesnt tell you the impact of a marginal vote
(05:36) How close should we expect the 2024 election to be?
(07:40) Knowing that 100,000 votes would swing the election isnt a game plan
(09:29) Part 2: So how valuable are swing-state votes?
(09:51) The microHarris: a unit of intervention effectiveness
(11:28) How many microHarrises is an extra vote for Harris?
(15:19) Does Nate Silvers model have too much spread?
(16:34) Conclusion
The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.
First published:
September 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iCSxHmHAXurZ4HwCr/the-value-of-a-vote-in-the-2024-presidential-election
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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The EA Hub will retire on the 6th of October 2024.
In 2022 we announced that we would stop further feature development and maintain the EA Hub until it is ready to be replaced by a new platform. In July this year, the EA Forum launched its People Directory, which offers a searchable directory of people involved in the EA movement, similar to what the Hub provided in the past.
We believe the Forum has now become better positioned to fulfil the EA Hub's mission of connecting people in the EA community online. The Forum team is much better resourced and users have many reasons to visit the Forum (e.g. for posts and events), which is reflected in it having more traffic and users. The Hub's core team has also moved on to other projects.
EA Hub users will be informed of this decision via email. [...]
First published:
September 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/m3HxhPLDuNcRm8qRN/the-ea-hub-is-retiring
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In this post, we include what is most important to know when you apply to Meta Charity Funders. We expect to update this post every round.
The most common reasons for rejection
By sharing the most common reasons for rejections, we hope to support future grantees and help people make more informed decisions on whether they should apply to Meta Charity Funders.
- The suggested project is not within scope: A fair amount of applications fall outside of the areas which our donors were interested in supporting. At a high level, Meta Charity Funders exists to fund projects that fall within the “meta” category and are unlikely to be funded by other major funders in this space. See “What we mean by 'meta'” further down.
- The theory of change (ToC) is unclear, unfocused, or seemed implausible: Some applicants do not share sufficient reasoning on how their project (in [...]
Outline:
(00:18) The most common reasons for rejection
(02:51) What we’re looking for in an application
(04:34) Transparency
(04:37) Individual donors working together
(05:00) Time committed by funders
(05:26) Feedback
(05:56) What is Meta Charity Funders (MCF)?
(07:07) What we mean by meta
(08:57) Example proposal
First published:
August 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5FXFrCe2PvXBdQbTX/meta-charity-funders-what-you-need-to-know-when-applying
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By Simon Knutsson and Magnus Vinding
This text is a general introduction to suffering-focused ethics. We describe different types of suffering-focused ethical views and explain some of the reasons why we find suffering-focused views reasonable. We also bring up and discuss some common misunderstandings and objections, and briefly cover some practical implications.
1. The core of suffering-focused ethical views
In essence, suffering-focused ethical views give a foremost priority to the reduction of suffering.[1] According to such views, there is something especially important or urgent about alleviating and preventing suffering. Usually, the primary concern is severe suffering rather than discomforts.
A simple example of a clearly suffering-focused view is the view that our only moral obligation is to reduce suffering as much as we can. Yet there are many types of suffering-focused views, as we will see in the next section. For instance, there can be differences in how [...]
Outline:
(00:29) 1. The core of suffering-focused ethical views
(01:34) 2. Different types of suffering-focused views
(02:50) 2.1 Consequentialist views
(04:06) 2.2 Views focused on consequences along with other considerations
(04:41) 2.3 Views based on categorical norms
(05:30) 2.4 Prioritising the reduction of suffering in certain domains, such as politics
(05:57) 2.5 Ideas that tend toward a focus on suffering
(06:53) 3. Why we find suffering-focused views reasonable
(07:33) 3.1 The importance of severe suffering
(09:46) 3.2 The importance of severe suffering compared to purported goods
(14:01) 3.3 The non-existence of positive final value
(17:55) 4. Misunderstandings about suffering-focused ethics
(18:01) 4.1 World destruction
(19:32) 4.2 Pro-death
(21:36) 5. On objections to suffering-focused views
(23:51) 5.1 Placing too much importance on suffering when choosing outcomes
(26:29) 5.2 World destruction
(29:41) 6. Priorities from a suffering-focused perspective
(30:10) 6.1 Reducing risks of worst-case outcomes
(30:39) 6.2 Reducing the suffering of non-human animals
(31:11) 6.3 Reducing the suffering of the worst-off humans
(31:37) 6.4 Reducing suffering in everyday life
(32:53) 7. Conclusion
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wLEyoncFCmDyqPA5f/introduction-to-suffering-focused-ethics-1
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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Crossposted from https://williamrsaunders.substack.com/p/principles-for-the-agi-race
Why form principles for the AGI Race?
I worked at OpenAI for 3 years, on the Alignment and Superalignment teams. Our goal was to prepare for the possibility that OpenAI succeeded in its stated mission of building AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, roughly able to do most things a human can do), and then proceed on to make systems smarter than most humans. This will predictably face novel problems in controlling and shaping systems smarter than their supervisors and creators, which we don't currently know how to solve. It's not clear when this will happen, but a number of people would throw around estimates of this happening within a few years.
While there, I would sometimes dream about what would have happened if I’d been a nuclear physicist in the 1940s. I do think that many of the kind of people who get involved in the effective [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Why form principles for the AGI Race?
(03:32) Bad High Risk Decisions
(04:46) Unnecessary Races to Develop Risky Technology
(05:17) High Risk Decision Principles
(05:21) Principle 1: Seek as broad and legitimate authority for your decisions as is possible under the circumstances
(07:20) Principle 2: Don’t take actions which impose significant risks to others without overwhelming evidence of net benefit
(10:52) Race Principles
(10:56) What is a Race?
(12:18) Principle 3: When racing, have an exit strategy
(13:03) Principle 4: Maintain accurate race intelligence at all times.
(14:23) Principle 5: Evaluate how bad it is for your opponent to win instead of you, and balance this against the risks of racing
(15:07) Principle 6: Seriously attempt alternatives to racing
(16:58) Meta Principles
(17:01) Principle 7: Don’t give power to people or structures that can’t be held accountable.
(18:36) Principle 8: Notice when you can’t uphold your own principles.
(19:17) Application of my Principles
(19:21) Working at OpenAI
(24:19) SB 1047
(28:32) Call to Action
First published:
August 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bkifWbSC2TC6n4CnB/principles-for-the-agi-race
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Meta Charity Funders is a funding circle consisting of ~10 funders, that funds meta initiatives and serves as an alternative to Open Philanthropy and EA funds.
We’re launching the third round of Meta Charity Funders. Apply for funding by September 30th or join the circle as a donor.
We expect all applicants to have read this post's twin post, “Meta Charity Funders: What you need to know when applying” to understand how to write your application.
Focus of this round
- We expect to fund many initiatives not on this list, but some projects that members of our circle have expressed extra interest in funding this round are:
- Ultra-high-net-worth-individual advising. However, we want to stress that we believe the skillset to do this well is rare, and these types of applications will be extra scrutinized.
- Effective Giving/Giving multiplier-organizations. For example, the ones incubated by CE's Effective Giving Incubation program.
- [...]
Outline:
(00:37) Focus of this round
(01:27) Information for this round
(01:31) Process
First published:
August 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zpPRQGjQ5yNkdriBR/meta-charity-funders-launching-the-3rd-round
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This is a link post. This is a cross-post of our newly updated article with advice on working at frontier AI companies if you want to help with AI safety.
The original article was published in June 2023. We decided to update it in May 2024, as events in the intervening year caused us to be more concerned about working for frontier AI companies, and we also wanted to explain why we still thought it made sense for some people to take roles at AI companies. Our overall view is that “it's complicated”: working at a frontier AI company is sometimes a good idea, and sometimes a bad idea; it depends on the role and type of work, the company, and your individual case.
The new article tries to more clearly lay out the case in favour and against working at frontier AI companies, give tips for mitigating the downsides [...]
Outline:
(01:00) Summary
(01:31) Pros
(01:46) Cons
(02:05) Recommendation: it's complicated
(02:35) Review status: Based on an in-depth investigation
(03:18) Introduction
(04:00) Why might it be high impact to work for a frontier AI company?
(04:06) Some roles at these companies might be among the best for reducing risks
(06:25) A frontier AI company could be a huge force for good
(10:21) It could be very good career capital (though there may also be career capital downsides)
(14:48) Whats the case against working at a frontier AI company?
(14:53) You might increase the risk of an AI-related catastrophe
(22:14) There are great alternatives that lack many of the downsides
(23:14) Things to consider for your particular case
(23:49) There are very different kinds of roles
(24:47) Some companies are probably much more responsible than others
(29:29) It matters who you are
(30:36) How can you reduce the downsides of working at a frontier AI company?
(32:56) Where might you work instead?
(35:04) Explore jobs
(35:16) Learn more about working at AI companies
(36:13) Acknowledgements
The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RF3sKfnz6osxnvHj6/should-you-work-at-a-frontier-ai-company
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We just published an interview: Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects. Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube, or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
This is a group of animals I think people are particularly unfamiliar with. They are especially poorly covered in our science curriculum; they are especially poorly understood, because people don’t spend as much time learning about them at museums; and they’re just harder to spend time with in a lot of ways, I think, for people.
So people have pets that are vertebrates that they take care of across the taxonomic groups, and people get familiar with those from going to zoos and watching their behaviours there, and watching nature documentaries and more. But I think the insects are still really underappreciated, and that means that our [...]
Outline:
(00:28) Episode summary
(02:10) Highlights
(02:13) Size diversity
(05:32) Offspring, parental investment, and lifespan
(08:49) Headless cockroaches
(11:13) Is self-protective behaviour a reflex?
(14:29) If insects feel pain, is it mild or severe?
(19:40) Evolutionary perspective on insect sentience
(23:39) How likely is insect sentience?
First published:
August 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/d8snuJrSnkCKb7sDv/198-challenging-our-assumptions-about-insects-meghan-barrett
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(Yes, yet another funding circle. Thank Ambitious Impact.)
I’m excited to announce the launch of the Strategic Animal Funding Circle, a new group of donors looking to support cost-effective and high-impact farmed animal welfare nonprofits during a critical growth phase where targeted funding can have an immense impact.
We’ve just launched our first Request For Proposals which you can see in this document, as well as being outlined below.
Apply here by September 20th to be considered for our first funding round. We aim for applicants to hear back on a decision by early November.
If there are any donors (either currently giving or willing to give upwards of $100-250k to farmed animals per year) interested in joining, feel free to email me at jozden[at]mobius.life. We expect the funding circle will expose donors to more high-impact opportunities, create the space for important discussions and reduce vetting inefficiencies.
[...]
Outline:
(01:04) Request for Proposals
(01:08) About this Funding Opportunity
(01:39) Eligibility Criteria:
(02:30) Selection Criteria: What Makes a Competitive Application?
(03:52) How to Apply:
(04:06) Future Rounds:
(04:16) About the Strategic Animal Funding Circle:
First published:
August 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cJ4jGs22CSA2A9SBo/announcing-the-strategic-animal-funding-circle
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Audio note: this article contains 119 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.
Note: this has been in my drafts for a long time, and I just decided to let it go without getting too hung up on details, so this is much rougher than it should be.
Alexander Berger: ...the central idea of worldview diversification is that the internal logic of a lot of these causes might be really compelling and a little bit totalizing, and you might want to step back and say, “Okay, I’m not ready to go all in on that internal logic.” So one example would be just comparing farm animal welfare to human causes within the remit of global health and wellbeing. One perspective on farm animal welfare would say, “Okay, we’re going to [...]
Outline:
(05:27) Statistical decision theory
(09:30) Bayes risk minimization
(11:40) Minimax risk minimization
(15:12) Expected utility maximization
(18:59) Conclusion
(19:26) Appendix: deriving risk
First published:
August 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wHaj9zpoeraQqBG9H/statistical-foundations-for-worldview-diversification
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Legal Impact for Chickens is hiring a Staff Attorney or Managing Attorney. We are prioritizing applications submitted by October 7.
About us:
Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC) is a 501(c)(3) litigation nonprofit. We work to protect farmed animals.
You may have seen our Costco shareholder derivative suit in The Washington Post, Fox Business, or CNN Business—or even on TikTok. Or perhaps you saw LIC recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators.
Now, we’re looking for our next hire—an entrepreneurial litigator to help fight for animals!
About you:
• 2+ years of litigation experience (for staff attorney)
• 6+ years of litigation experience (for managing attorney)
• Licensed and in good standing with the state bar where you live
• Excellent analytical, writing, and verbal-communication skills
• Zealous, creative, enthusiastic litigator
• Passion for helping farmed animals
• Interest in entering a startup nonprofit on the ground floor, and [...]
First published:
August 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tCrhQ94sqovr2sgKu/legal-impact-for-chickens-is-hiring-an-attorney
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This is a link post. We have yet to see anyone describe a critical element of effective AI safety planning: a realistic model of the upcoming role the US government will play in controlling frontier AI.
The rapid development of AI will lead to increasing national security concerns, which will in turn pressure the US to progressively take action to control frontier AI development. This process has already begun,[1] and it will only escalate as frontier capabilities advance.
However, we argue that existing descriptions of nationalization[2] along the lines of a new Manhattan Project[3] are unrealistic and reductive. The state of the frontier AI industry — with more than $1 trillion[4] in private funding, tens of thousands of participants, and pervasive economic impacts — is unlike nuclear research or any previously nationalized industry. The traditional interpretation of nationalization, which entails bringing private assets under the ownership of a [...]
Outline:
(02:27) Part 1: What is Soft Nationalization?
(04:02) 1. Private US labs are currently the leading organizations pushing the frontier of AI development, and will be among the first to develop AI with transformative capabilities.
(05:04) 2. Advanced AI will have significant impacts on national security and the balance of global power.
(07:18) 3. A key priority for the US government is to ensure global military and technological superiority.
(08:57) 4. Hence, the US government will begin to exert greater control and influence over the shape, ownership, and direction of frontier AI labs in national security use-cases.
(09:51) Why Total Nationalization Is Not The Most Likely Model
(14:42) Upcoming Projects on Soft Nationalization
(15:48) 1. Describing Soft Nationalization
(16:49) 2. Conducting Further Scenario Research
(17:40) 3. Aligning AI Safety with Soft Nationalization
(18:39) Part 2: Policy Levers for Soft Nationalization
(20:05) Management and Governance Mechanisms
(20:22) Government Oversight
(21:33) Government Management
(22:45) Government Projects and Integrations
(24:04) Operational Control
(24:21) Development Limitations
(25:26) Customer Limitations
(26:43) Deployment / Use Limitations
(27:49) Compute Usage Limitations
(29:27) Security and Containment Measures
(29:41) Personnel Requirements
(31:02) Research and Information Controls
(32:24) Cybersecurity Requirements
(33:38) Containment Requirements
(34:36) Financial Ownership and Control
(34:53) Shareholding Scenarios
(36:08) Profit Regulation and Unique Tax Treatment
(37:11) Part 3: Scenarios Illustrating Soft Nationalization
(38:20) US “Brain Drain”
(40:23) Escalation of an AI Arms Race
(43:33) Nationalization of Bioweapon Technologies
(46:54) Conclusion
The original text contained 32 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 4 images which were described by AI.
First published:
August 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/47RH47AyLnHqCQRCD/soft-nationalization-how-the-us-government-will-control-ai
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. Japan spent more than $19.6 billion on overseas development assistance (ODA) in 2023, making it the third largest single-country donor behind the US and Germany. Open Philanthropy's Global Aid Policy (GAP) team, which is devoted to increasing government aid and guiding it toward more cost-effective approaches, believes there may be opportunities to increase the impact of this aid through targeted advocacy efforts. They estimate that in Western nations like the UK, for every $1,000 spent on ODA, aid advocacy funders spend around $2.60 attempting to support and inform its allocation. Meanwhile, in Japan, advocacy spending is a mere $0.25 for the same amount — more than 10 times less. Accordingly, the GAP program has prioritized work in Japan. The following case study highlights one grantee helping to drive this work forward.
One day in March 2023, in the district of Wayanad near India's southern [...]
First published:
August 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JDgGiAwH9tGQcLT6u/how-platinum-helps-draw-attention-to-japan-s-role-in-global
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This is a link post. This is a crosspost for The most basic rationality techniques are often neglected and Rationality and discipline by Stefan Schubert, published on 30 August and 15 September 2021.
The most basic rationality techniques are often neglected and Rationality and discipline
How much can we "debias" ourselves? What should we do to become more rational? When discussing those issues, people usually focus on sophisticated debiasing techniques (“pre-mortem”) and advanced concepts from epistemology and statistics. What's often forgotten is that we already have a bunch of very simple but effective techniques for improving our rationality, such as (cf. Grice's maxims):
“Don’t believe things for which you lack evidence. And don’t say such things in discussions.”
“Don’t make irrelevant personal attacks.”
“Don’t attack straw men."
“Define your terms clearly.”
“Make one point at a time.”
“Try not to be too emotional when thinking about heated issues.”
It seems [...]
Outline:
(00:22) The most basic rationality techniques are often neglected and Rationality and discipline
(03:09) Rationality and discipline
First published:
August 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YLXhmbjeszjeCzXrz/the-most-basic-rationality-techniques-are-often-neglected
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Since I started in my position of Community Building Grants (CBG) manager at CEA, a program focused on a subset of city and national EA groups, I noticed that not everybody has an understanding of what city and national groups are doing, and how they could be impactful.
With this post I would like to highlight a few examples of successful city and national groups (from the CBG program, as I am most familiar with these groups), hoping that this will shine more light on what these kinds of groups do, and how this might lead to impact[1].
How city and national groups produce value
In general, we think city and national EA groups can have impact through different theories of change[2]:
- Supporting talent to work on top causes
- Incubating and accelerating local/university groups and other EA projects
- Building local infrastructure (such as operational support for [...]
Outline:
(00:38) How city and national groups produce value
(02:07) Success stories
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hqsYvcZMBt6rwR4nr/examples-of-success-from-city-and-national-groups
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The basic idea
Aether will be a small group of talented early-career AI safety researchers with a shared research vision who work full-time with mentorship on their best effort at making AI go well. That research vision will broadly revolve around the alignment, control, and evaluation of LLM agents. There is a lot of latent talent in the AI safety space, and this group will hopefully serve as a way to convert some of that talent into directly impactful work and great career capital.
Get involved!
- Submit a short expression of interest here by Fri, Aug 23rd at 11:59pm PT if you would like to contribute to the group as a full-time in-person researcher, part-time / remote collaborator, or advisor. (Note: Short turnaround time!)
- Apply to join the group here by Sat, Aug 31st at 11:59pm PT.
- Get in touch with Rohan at rs4126@columbia.edu with any questions.
Who are we?
Team [...]
Outline:
(00:05) The basic idea
(00:38) Get involved!
(01:12) Who are we?
(01:15) Team members so far
(03:26) Advisors
(03:50) Research agenda
(05:50) Logistics
(06:56) Considerations
(07:00) Why you might want to join Aether:
(09:29) Why you might not want to join Aether:
(10:24) Sample of semi-concrete project ideas
First published:
August 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BEuJdpTPcyKYaD9X7/apply-to-aether-independent-llm-agent-safety-research-group
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This is a link post. Summary
This post gives my personal take on “AI for epistemics” and how important it might be to work on.
Some background context:
- AI capabilities are advancing rapidly and I think it's important to think ahead and prepare for the possible development of AI that could automate almost all economically relevant tasks that humans can do.[1]
- That kind of AI would have a huge impact on key epistemic processes in our society. (I.e.: It would have a huge impact on how new facts get found, how new research gets done, how new forecasts get made, and how all kinds of information spread through society.)
- I think it's very important for our society to have excellent epistemic processes. (I.e.: For important decisions in our society to be made by people or AI systems who have informed and unbiased beliefs that take into account as much [...]
Outline:
(00:07) Summary
(04:38) Structure of the post
(05:35) Previous work
(07:31) Why work on AI for epistemics?
(07:36) Summary
(09:40) Importance
(12:17) Path-dependence
(14:47) To be more concrete
(15:39) Good norms and practices for AI-as-knowledge-producers
(17:14) Good norms and practices for AI-as-communicators
(19:32) Differentially high epistemic capabilities
(27:15) Heuristics for good interventions
(28:03) Direct vs. indirect strategies
(29:27) Indirect value generation
(33:33) On long-lasting differential capability improvements
(36:13) Painting a picture of the future
(41:06) Concrete projects for differentially advancing epistemic capabilities
(43:50) Evals/benchmarks for forecasting (or other ambitious epistemic assistance)
(44:30) Automate forecasting question-generation and -resolution
(46:02) Logistics of past-casting
(50:24) Start efforts inside of AI companies for AI forecasting or other ambitious epistemic assistance
(51:37) Scalable oversight / weak-to-strong-generalization / ELK
(53:56) Experiments on what type of arguments and AI interactions tend to lead humans toward truth vs. mislead them
(56:14) Concluding thoughts
The original text contained 22 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jPKoNFRowKJwGgGyy/what-s-important-in-ai-for-epistemics
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I'm a big fan of small, underrated acts that can have outsized positive impact (both in terms EA and in life more generally). I'd like to share one such practice I've incorporated into my life this year that brings me joy and I think some others here would enjoy: redirecting money owed to me towards Givewell recommended charities.
Whenever someone owes me money or is trying to solicit my time, instead of asking for direct payment, I request they instead contribute that amount to a GiveWell-recommended charity. This comes up in several contexts:
- Friends repaying me miscellaneous expenses
- Buyers purchasing items from me (ie selling something used online)
- Being solicited for my participation in programs or sales pitches
I appreciate this just sounds like "Isn't this just offsetting your own charitable giving?" But I believe this approach creates additional value beyond the off-set donation:
- Exposure Effect: By [...]
First published:
August 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rCvaLdjefLoxtfcrv/small-simple-way-to-promote-effective-giving-while-making
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Hello EA community! My lab recently launched the Structural Democratic Reforms project, which is using crowdsourcing, expert evaluation, and messaging testing to identify the best democratic reforms to safeguard and strengthen American democracy. We're in the crowdsourcing phase, and we'd love to get folks from the EA community to submit their ideas for democratic reforms!
Here's why I'm especially keen on getting ideas from those in the EA community: Right now, our submitters are disproportionately academic political scientists. By tapping into the EA community, we'll hopefully have a more diverse set of ideas from a more diverse group of thinkers. And because EA folks typically push for the most effective solutions--often with creative or unconventional ideas that others might miss--I thought it would be especially interesting and important crowdsource from this group.
Submissions can be made here and can take under 5 minutes. The deadline for [...]
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LYvwqsqkGzGbgLCwX/crowdsourcing-the-best-ideas-for-structural-democratic
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Executive summary
We believe contributions to the 2024 US election are worthy of serious consideration. In particular, we believe this election is much more tractable and important than conventional wisdom within the EA community suggests. Many of our team members were previously working in AI safety/governance and have temporarily switched to focusing primarily on the election. We think more EAs should consider doing the same.
This election is much more tractable than most expect:
- US presidential elections are often decided by slim margins in a few swing states (537 votes in 2000, 77,744 in 2016, and 42,918 in 2020).
- The best polling data we have as of August 2024 is that 2024's margins will be in a similar range, with Harris very slightly favored to lose.
- Given how small margins of victory have been, many organizations have arguably been responsible for flipping past presidential elections (and [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Executive summary
(03:25) Introduction
(04:38) Influencing the US election is tractable
(04:43) US presidential elections are often close
(06:45) Having an impact on the election is relatively straightforward
(07:58) There is still low-hanging fruit
(11:15) Electoral politics has poor incentives and talent retention
(13:16) The 2024 election is much more important than other elections
(13:22) A second Trump term would likely be far more damaging for liberal democracy than the last
(18:03) This is an especially critical period for AI
(18:50) Trump is unusually bad at governing
(19:59) How you can help
(20:19) Urgency and irreversibility
(21:23) Donate
(23:46) Get involved
(25:06) Appendix
(25:09) The opportunity cost of a Trump presidency
(26:44) The candidates on some EA cause areas
(27:03) Artificial Intelligence
(29:44) Pandemic response and biosecurity
(31:39) Global health
(33:04) Climate change
(34:54) Nuclear Risk
(36:40) Farm animal welfare
(38:21) US-China and international relations
(43:01) An incredibly rough model of the cost to flip the election
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QJfy2gBdZbw5cDXdh/the-case-for-contributing-to-the-2024-us-election-with-your
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The views expressed here are my own, not those of my employers.
Summary
- The Life You Can Save (TLYCS) suggests people earning 40 to 80 k$/year donate just 1 % of their net income, which I think is too low.
- Would it even be good if some people in extreme poverty wanted to sign the 🔸10% Pledge, and donated to the most cost-effective animal welfare interventions?
Recommendations from The Life You Can Save
TLYCS has a calculator to suggest the amount of annual donations based on the country of residence and annual pre-tax income. For people living in the United States earning:
- Less than 40 k$/year, they “recommend giving whatever you feel you can afford without undue hardship”.
- 40 to 80 k$/year, they “recommend” annual donations equal to 1 % of the annual pre-tax income.
TLYCS also emphasises the idea of striving towards one's personal best in terms of [...]
Outline:
(00:14) Summary
(00:39) Recommendations from The Life You Can Save
(03:36) Donations of people in extreme poverty
(05:51) Acknowledgements
First published:
August 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uaWF9ix9gdPkyApth/the-life-you-can-save-suggests-people-earning-40-to-80-kusd
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I asked readers of my blog with experience in AI alignment (and especially AI grantmaking) to fill out a survey about how they valued different goods. I got 61 responses. I disqualified 11 for various reasons, mostly failing the comprehension check question at the beginning, and kept 50.
Because I didn't have a good way to represent the value of "a" dollar for people who might have very different amounts of money managed, I instead asked people to value things in terms of a base unit - a program like MATS graduating one extra technical alignment researcher (at the center, not the margin). So for example, someone might say that "creating" a new AI journalist was worth "creating" two new technical alignment researchers, or vice versa.
One of the goods that I asked people to value was $1 million going to a smart, value-aligned grantmaker. This provided a sort [...]
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E7pkeDruknpSa7j3i/results-of-an-informal-survey-on-ai-grantmaking
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. ---
First published:
August 16th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jmEwHNaqz5zLaCrvd/charitable-giving-is-a-life-hack
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I think that the concept of "alignment research" (and the distinction between that and "capabilities research") is currently a fairly confused one. In this post I’ll describe some of the problems with how people typically think about these terms, and offer replacement definitions.
“Alignment” and “capabilities” are primarily properties of AIs not of AI research
The first thing to highlight is that the distinction between alignment and capabilities is primarily doing useful work when we think of them as properties of AIs. This distinction is still under-appreciated by the wider machine learning community. ML researchers have historically thought about performance of models almost entirely with respect to the tasks they were specifically trained on. However, the rise of LLMs has vindicated the alignment community's focus on general capabilities, and now it's much more common to assume that performance on many tasks (including out-of-distribution tasks) will improve roughly in parallel. [...]
Outline:
(00:20) “Alignment” and “capabilities” are primarily properties of AIs not of AI research
(05:04) What types of research are valuable for preventing misalignment?
(05:29) Valuable property 1: worst-case focus
(07:21) Valuable property 2: scientific approach
(11:48) A better definition of alignment research
First published:
August 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ajcQELstaSGYxdoRj/defining-alignment-research
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Probably Good recently launched a new article series, Career Journeys: Interviews with people working to make a difference.
In this series, we interview people from a range of fields and career paths to bring a more personal perspective to career planning. Each conversation explores how people got to where they are today, what their day-to-day work entails, and what advice they’d give to others pursuing a similar path.
As several “write about your job” posts have noted, jobs are still mysterious both in terms of how people get them and what they actually look like to do. These interviews provide some insight into how varied—and often surprising—lived career experiences can be. We hope they can be a catalyst for our readers to consider new paths and apply any advice they find relevant for their path.
Check out our first few interviews, now live on the site:
- Astronaut [...]
First published:
August 20th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qjcjdYbEh6HBGi9Py/a-new-interview-series-with-people-doing-impactful-work
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As AIM's Director of Recruitment, I'm running an AMA to answer any questions you may have about applying for our programs, as well as any questions that may be of interest from my other experience (such as co-founding Maternal Health Initiative).
Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) currently has applications open until September 15th for two of our programs.
- Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Programme
- AIM Founding to Give
You can read more about both programs in this earlier EA Forum post. Please consider applying!
Why a personal AMA?
Answers to questions can often be subjective. I do not want to claim to speak for every member of AIM's team. As such, I want to make clear that I will be answering in a personal capacity. I think this has a couple of notable benefits:
- My answers can be a little more candid since I don't have to worry [...]
Outline:
(00:43) Why a personal AMA?
(01:27) A little about me
(02:31) Things you could ask me
(03:10) How the AMA works
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ypcgspAmDnqZ37ufg/ama-with-aim-s-director-of-recruitment-and-mhi-co-founder
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Introduction
I’m Zach, the new CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). As I step into my role, I want to explain the principles that I think make EA special and share how CEA will continue to promote them.
In this post, I will:
- Highlight the principles that I think are core to EA, and explain why CEA will continue to promote them above and beyond any single or set of cause area(s).
- Explain what being principles-first means in practice for CEA[1].
- Explain how encouraging people to act on EA principles can still lead to some prioritization decisions between causes, how CEA has navigated those decisions in the past, and what factors influence those decisions.
- Share a little bit about my background and how I’ve personally engaged with these principles.
CEA will continue a “principles-first” approach to EA
In my role at CEA, I embrace [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Introduction
(01:04) CEA will continue a “principles-first” approach to EA
(03:33) Why principles-first?
(09:55) What exactly does principles-first mean for CEA?
(10:37) Sometimes we’ll prioritize some causes over others
(19:44) The role of principles in my path through EA
(23:42) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 20th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jPDByBkEdPt2SF2LL/cea-will-continue-to-take-a-principles-first-approach-to-ea
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There is a good post exploring sickle cell disease, here: [Cause Exploration Prizes] Sickle Cell Disease — EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org). This is a good starting point before reading this one.
Effective Help[1] is a small EA-inspired Cameroonian[2] organization trying to identify local cost-effective projects. We analysed data from 39 local projects and found one standing out, a small monthly cash transfer to families with a child or more suffering from sickle cell anaemia. We decided to partner with the NGO carrying out this project and raise funds for it.
We think this is a good way forward for us. Please go through our thinking below and tell us how to improve.
Questions:
- How bad is sickle cell anaemia in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cameroon in particular) for those who suffer it?
- Are cash transfers to families with children suffering from this problem a cost-effective form of reducing mortality and [...]
First published:
August 16th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cTRpwcwtz9SBJdGwT/critique-our-position-sickle-cell-anaemia-in-sub-saharan
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The identifiable victim effect is a psychological phenomenon that describes how people are more likely to offer help or feel empathy when presented with a specific, identifiable individual in need, rather than a larger, anonymous group. When victims are given names, faces, or personal stories, it becomes easier for them to relate.
People are more likely to help a specific, identifiable individual in need Studies have shown that this is also the case for farmed animals, and that this effect can be limited to a single-identifiable victim (i.e., the singularity effect, the phenomenon where people are more motivated to help a single victim than a group of victims, even when the group is small). Identifying a victim can be seen as a solution to scope insensitivity; people undervalue the scale of a problem when presented with statistics. That insight is the basis of storytelling—showing individuals turns numbers into faces [...]
Outline:
(02:57) What is a Story?
(05:01) Language Hides the Animal's Story
(06:46) How Can We Tell Individual Stories?
(08:29) The Camera On Animal Tool
(09:37) The Story of Tom
(11:17) Possible Objections to Individual-Focused Advocacy
(12:05) Open Questions Regarding Animal Storytelling
(12:39) Conclusion
The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.
First published:
August 18th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kzJBgcYhzBF6ZP9JH/are-we-leaving-the-individual-behind-the-role-of-animal
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. Summary
If AI progress continues on its current trajectory, the developers of advanced AI systems—and the governments who house those developers—will accrue tremendous wealth and technological power.
In this post, I consider how and why US government[1] may want to internationally share some benefits accrued from advanced AI—like financial benefits or monitored access to private cutting-edge AI models. Building on prior work that discusses international benefit-sharing primarily from a global welfare or equality lens, I examine how strategic benefit-sharing could unlock international agreements that help all agreeing states and bolster global security.
Two “use cases” for strategic benefit-sharing in international AI governance:
- Incentivizing states to join a coalition on safe AI development
- Securing the US’ lead in advanced AI development to allow for more safety work
I also highlight an important, albeit fuzzy, distinction between benefit-sharing and power-sharing:
- Benefit-sharing: Sharing AI-derived benefits [...]
Outline:
(00:10) Summary
(02:07) Introduction
(04:43) What types of international AI governance agreements could strategic benefit-sharing (and power-sharing) unlock?
(07:13) Benefit-sharing vs power-sharing: An important, fuzzy distinction
(09:12) What AI-derived benefits could the USG share with other states?
(11:15) Financial and resource-based benefits
(12:47) Frontier AI benefits
(16:46) ‘Seats at the table’ for decision-making related to AI development
(18:52) Empowering other states national security
(20:42) Other benefits
(21:23) Two key considerations for benefit-sharing
The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 16th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GGHbGDpNaqx99qxRH/sharing-the-ai-windfall-a-strategic-approach-to
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Crossposted from the AI Impacts Blog. This is a snapshot of a new page on the AI Impacts Wiki.
We’ve made a list of arguments[1] that AI poses an existential risk to humanity. We’d love to hear how you feel about them in the comments, or in the poll on the LessWrong crosspost version.
Competent non-aligned agents
Humans increasingly lose games to the best AI systems. If AI systems become similarly adept at navigating the real world, will humans also lose out? (Image: Midjourney) Summary:
- Humans will build AI systems that are 'agents', i.e. they will autonomously pursue goals
- Humans won’t figure out how to make systems with goals that are compatible with human welfare and realizing human values
- Such systems will be built or selected to be highly competent, and so gain the power to achieve their goals
- Thus the future will be primarily controlled by AIs [...]
Outline:
(00:25) Competent non-aligned agents
(02:01) Second species argument
(03:52) Loss of control via inferiority
(05:30) Loss of control via speed
(07:04) Human non-alignment
(08:27) Catastrophic tools
(10:00) Powerful black boxes
(11:35) Multi-agent dynamics
(12:49) Large impacts
(14:19) Expert opinion
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First published:
August 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WGNufK8TofHRSji9c/ten-arguments-that-ai-is-an-existential-risk
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Open Philanthropy needs more recruiters. We’d love to see you apply, even if you’ve never worked in hiring before.
"Recruiting” is sometimes used to narrowly refer to headhunting or outreach. At Open Phil, though, “recruiting” includes everything related to the hiring process. Our recruiting team manages the systems and people that take us from applications to offers. We design evaluations, interview candidates, manage stakeholders, etc.[1]
We’re looking for:
- An operations mindset. Recruiting is project management, first and foremost; we want people who can reliably juggle lots of balls without dropping them.
- Interpersonal skills. We want clear communicators with good people judgment.
- Interest in Open Phil's mission. This is an intentionally broad definition–see below!
What you don’t need:
- Prior recruiting experience. We’ll teach you!
- To be well-networked or highly immersed in EA. You should be familiar with the areas Open Phil works in (such as global health and [...]
Outline:
(00:36) We’re looking for:
(01:04) What you don’t need:
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 16th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9qGhQAST9mpcLMsPy/open-philanthropy-is-hiring-people-to-help-hire-more-people
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The following report is also available at the website of Allied Scholars for Animal Protection.
Background
This study examined the state of animal advocacy and number of events held by vegan and animal advocacy student groups at the top 100 U.S. universities. Our central research questions were:
- How many events were held to educate students, especially non- vegans, on veganism and animal welfare?
- Why is animal advocacy ineffective in universities? Why is animal advocacy unsustainable in universities?
- How many advocacy events were held recently by university student groups?
- What can we learn from other student organizations in building a sustainable movement?
We also conducted a qualitative survey of several influential animal advocacy professionals regarding their views on the state of campus animal advocacy.
Thanks to the following individuals for their contributions and insights:
- Dr. Courtney Dillard, Mercy for Animals
- Nicole Rawling, JD, Material Innovation Initiative
- Aidan Kanyoku [...]
Outline:
(00:22) Background
(01:41) Key Findings
(02:58) Method Overview
(04:32) Results
(04:35) How Many Advocacy Groups Are Active?
(06:13) How Often Do Active Groups Hold Events?
(07:34) Discussion
(08:29) What Does Effective Movement-Building Look Like?
(08:48) The Federalist Society
(10:02) Cru
(11:36) The Good Food Institute
(12:57) Effective Altruism Community Building
(14:53) The Animal Legal Defense Fund
(16:22) Vegan Outreach
(18:01) Other Attempts at Sparking a Campus Animal Rights Movement
(19:33) Vegan Movement Building Has Unique Challenges
(20:45) Reasons for hope
(22:19) Survey of Professional Animal Advocates
(25:04) Conclusion
(27:17) Caveats and Limitations
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First published:
August 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NCoFiDGBanHq7EKSz/report-the-broken-state-of-animal-advocacy-in-universities
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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We just published an interview: Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter. Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube, or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
In the 1980s, it was still apparently common to perform surgery on newborn babies without anaesthetic on both sides of the Atlantic. This led to appalling cases, and to public outcry, and to campaigns to change clinical practice. And as soon as [some courageous scientists] looked for evidence, it showed that this practice was completely indefensible and then the clinical practice was changed.
People don’t need convincing anymore that we should take newborn human babies seriously as sentience candidates. But the tale is a useful cautionary tale, because it shows you how deep that overconfidence can run and how problematic it can be. [...]
Outline:
(00:28) Episode summary
(02:19) Highlights
(02:22) The history of neonatal surgery without anaesthetic
(04:45) Overconfidence around disorders of consciousness
(08:02) Separating abortion from the issue of foetal sentience
(11:23) The cases for and against neural organoids
(15:10) Artificial sentience arising from whole brain emulations of roundworms and fruit flies
(20:25) Using citizens assemblies to do policymaking
First published:
August 16th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kf3ttuWghvF2TeL6R/196-the-edge-cases-of-sentience-and-why-they-matter-jonathan
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. If you enjoy this, please consider subscribing to my Substack.
My latest reporting went up in The Nation yesterday:
It's about the tech industry's meltdown in response to SB 1047, a California bill that would be the country's first significant attempt to mandate safety measures from developers of AI models more powerful and expensive than any yet known.
Rather than summarize that story, I’ve added context from some past reporting as well as new reporting on two big updates from yesterday: a congressional letter asking Newsom to veto the bill and a slate of amendments.
The real AI divide
After spending months on my January cover story in Jacobin on the AI existential risk debates, one of my strongest conclusions was that the AI ethics crowd (focused on the tech's immediate harms) and the x-risk crowd (focused on speculative, extreme risks) should recognize their shared [...]
Outline:
(00:56) The real AI divide
(03:18) The congressional letter
(05:58) The turning tides
(09:29) Capitalism vs. democracy
(10:15) Yesterday's amendments to SB 1047
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 16th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/snto3JZs6HrgvsoJG/the-tech-industry-is-the-biggest-blocker-to-meaningful-ai
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This chart is so right. The local charity environment in Cameroon is probably helping much less people than you imagine. We ran an effectiveness contest that aligns with this research perfectly.
In 2021 we created an EA group in Cameroon. We had multiple seminars covering the basics of Effective Altruism. By the end of 2022, the group got so excited that we created a charity.
“We” are a group of humanitarian/development workers in Cameroon, all currently employed in this field of work. Some of the basic EA principles resonated a lot. Such as the feeling that some activities and projects don’t really help much and that somewhere, sometimes, there is “real impact”.
So we created this charity to help steer organizations towards real impact, and help them become “more effective”. We tried a couple of things:
We offered consultancy services, starting for free, to local charities.
We started a [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 16th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TcMhE3SypnE9oLpoE/this-chart-is-right-most-interventions-don-t-do-much
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. Application deadline: September 16th 2024. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
We are hiring a Head of Operations to set a newly-independent CEA up for success by establishing our new legal entities, managing our spin-out process, and building a world class operations team.
Apply now I (JP) am crossposting the whole job description because I think it's a good look into what a really senior ops role looks like, and what CEA in particular has going on behind the scenes.
CEA is entering a new era having recently appointed a new CEO and begun the process of spinning out from Effective Ventures (EV) to become an independent organisation. With around 40 staff (and growing), a budget over $25 million, and an established track record of delivering highly impactful programs, we’re uniquely well-positioned to steward the effective altruism community, increase its potential for impact, and [...]
Outline:
(02:37) What would you do?
(06:12) What are we looking for?
(08:29) Other information
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uCt7FZKc8fXEDgAif/cea-is-hiring-a-head-of-operations-apply-by-sep-16
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This is a link post. I wrote an article on California AI safety bill SB 1047 for The Nation and the reaction from the AI industry, investors, and the broader tech community. The story was informed by conversations with over a dozen relevant sources and comes shortly before the bill faces a floor vote in the California Assembly.
I think it's useful to understand how industry responds to attempts to regulate AI, and centered my analysis on that topic.
If you're interested in helping share the article, I made a Tweet thread.
First published:
August 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JfzX3oC4ZnotmrFWg/my-article-in-the-nation-california-s-ai-safety-bill-is-a
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I run the 80,000 Hours one-on-one team. We speak to about 1.5k people a year about their careers. Our internal term for these people, which I'll use throughout this post, is 'advisees'. One of the biggest ways we help people is by making introductions to people working in high impact fields (we refer to them internally as 'specialists'). Below is the guidance we give specialists on how to make those introductions worthwhile.
Background
One of the core things we’re trying to figure out on an advisee call is whether there are other people we know about who could be useful for the person to chat to. People have reported these kinds of introductions to have been surprisingly useful in the past.
Sometimes it's very clear what the value of an introduction can be, such as putting a hiring manager in touch with someone who has the profile [...]
Outline:
(00:33) Background
(02:33) Tips on how to make the conversations you have more useful
First published:
August 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eQiSxi3oaxdiM9b24/how-to-have-high-impact-conversations
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Post authors: Eli Rose, Asya Bergal
Posting in our capacities as members of Open Philanthropy's Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team.
This program, together with our separate program for programs and events on global catastrophic risk, effective altruism, and other topics, has replaced our 2021 request for proposals for outreach projects. If you have a project which was in-scope for that program but isn't for either of these, you can apply to our team's general application instead.
We think it's possible that the coming decades will see "transformative" progress in artificial intelligence, i.e., progress that leads to changes in human civilization at least as large as those brought on by the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. It is currently unclear to us whether these changes will go well or poorly, and we think that people today can do meaningful work to increase the likelihood of positive outcomes.
To that [...]
Outline:
(02:47) Categories of work we’re interested in
(02:52) Training and mentorship programs
(04:27) Events
(06:16) Groups
(07:17) Resources, media and communications
(08:48) Other
(09:24) More information
(09:28) Eligible proposals
(10:43) Application process
First published:
August 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fZH9toukKaHSELafN/funding-for-work-that-builds-capacity-to-address-risks-from
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This is a link post. Manifund is hosting a $200k funding round for EA community projects, where the grant decisions are made by you. You can direct $100-$800 of funding towards the projects that have helped with your personal journey as an EA. Your choices then decide how $100k in matching will be allocated, via quadratic funding!
Sign up here to get notified when the projects are live, or read on to learn more!
Timeline
- Phase 1: Project registrations open (Aug 13)
- Project organizers can now create a page for their projects here, to raise funding as part of this EA Community Choice round.
- Community members can sign up for updates here, or recommend projects to sign up here.
- Phase 2: Community members receive funds (Aug 20)
- We’ll give everyone $100 to donate; more if you’ve been active in the EA community. Fill out a 2-minute form [...]
Outline:
(00:35) Timeline
(03:22) What is an EA community project?
(05:23) FAQ
(09:31) Get involved!
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GgYfqrATFzLAaPdct/announcing-the-usd200k-ea-community-choice
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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The Humane League UK have released our State of the Chicken Industry report today! Read it here.
WHAT IS IT?
The State of the Chicken Industry report titled ‘Who's selling you Frankenchickens?’ argues that minimum welfare standards should be lifted across the board by supermarkets by signing up to the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), particularly as welfare labels can be confusing and misleading.
WHAT IS IN IT?
It contains a summary of the industry as it stands, problems/solutions facing the BCC, information on THL UK's judicial review, public opinion polling on supermarket labels, and opinions concerning the chicken industry from experts, corporates, and groups from across different sectors.
WHAT CAN YOU USE IT FOR?
This report is designed to highlight where businesses stand on implementing the Better Chicken Commitment in the UK. It can be used as a resource for campaigners and animal advocates to better understand the current [...]
Outline:
(00:04) The Humane League UK have released our State of the Chicken Industry report today! Read it here.
(00:14) WHAT IS IT?
(00:33) WHAT IS IN IT?
(00:54) WHAT CAN YOU USE IT FOR?
(01:15) HOW TO TAKE ACTION
First published:
August 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DkaduND2zmyhQxvLv/new-report-who-s-selling-you-frankenchickens
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Introduction
In May 2024, Ambitious Impact (AIM) ran a program to incubate new effective giving initiatives (EGIs) in partnership with Giving What We Can. In short, EGIs focus on raising awareness and funneling public and philanthropic donations to the most cost-effective charities worldwide.
In the last few years, several Effective Giving Initiatives, such as Doneer Effectief, Effektiv Spenden, and Giving What We Can, have moved millions in funding to the best charities globally. The success of these and other similar organizations suggests that further initiatives in this space could be highly beneficial, given that many highly effective charities are bottlenecked by access to funding.
This article introduces five new effective giving initiatives incubated through the program we ran earlier this year in their own words. It summarizes their country of operation, near-term plans, targets, and any room for additional seed funding.[1]
Organization Summaries
Ellis Impact
Co-founders [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Introduction
(01:06) Organization Summaries
(01:09) Ellis Impact
(01:38) Background (why is this a promising country/angle for an EGI?)
(02:47) Near-term plans
(03:21) Targets (reach/giving multiplier/etc.)
(03:45) Room for more funding
(04:58) Benefficienza
(05:25) Background (why is this a promising country/angle for an EGI?)
(06:07) Near-term plans
(06:47) Targets (reach/giving multiplier/etc.)
(07:02) Room for more funding
(07:44) Mieux Donner
(08:11) Background
(09:57) Near-term plans
(11:26) Targets
(11:56) Room for more funding
(12:43) Effectief Geven
(13:14) Background
(14:06) Near-term plans
(14:56) Targets
(15:12) Room for more funding
(15:41) Impactful Giving
(16:06) Background (why is this a promising country/angle for an EGI?)
(17:43) Near-term plans
(18:40) Targets (reach/giving multiplier/etc.)
(19:08) Room for more funding
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First published:
August 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qq4KtwJHtCTLPqdy6/presenting-five-new-effective-giving-initiatives
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Post authors: Eli Rose, Asya Bergal
Posting in our capacities as members of Open Philanthropy's Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team.
Note: This program, together with our separate program for work that builds capacity to address risks from transformative AI, has replaced our 2021 request for proposals for outreach projects. If you have a project which was in-scope for that program but isn't for either of these, you can apply to our team's general application instead.
Apply for funding here. Applications are open until further notice and will be assessed on a rolling basis.
This is a wide-ranging call for applications, seeking to fund programs and events in a variety of areas of interest to Open Philanthropy — including effective altruism, global catastrophic risks, biosecurity, AI for epistemics, forecasting, and other areas. In general, if the topic of your program or event falls within one of our [...]
Outline:
(02:42) AI-focused work
(03:07) Application information
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qCz7eRfQhkaws4tNN/funding-for-programs-and-events-on-global-catastrophic-risk
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This is a link post. Authors of linked report: Tegan McCaslin, Josh Rosenberg, Ezra Karger, Avital Morris, Molly Hickman, Otto Kuusela, Sam Glover, Zach Jacobs, Phil Tetlock[1]
Today, the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI), released “Conditional Trees: A Method for Generating Informative Questions about Complex Topics,” which discusses the results of a case study in using conditional trees to generate informative questions about AI risk. In this post, we provide a brief overview of the methods, findings, and directions for further research. For much more analysis and discussion, see the full report: https://forecastingresearch.org/s/AIConditionalTrees.pdf
Abstract
We test a new process for generating high-value forecasting questions: asking experts to produce “conditional trees,” simplified Bayesian networks of quantifiably informative forecasting questions. We test this technique in the context of the current debate about risks from AI. We conduct structured interviews with 21 AI domain experts and 3 highly skilled generalist forecasters (“superforecasters”) to [...]
Outline:
(00:55) Abstract
(02:12) Executive Summary
(02:41) Methods
(04:25) Results
(04:28) The conditional trees method can generate forecasting questions that are more informative than existing questions on popular forecasting platforms
(07:05) Questions generated through the conditional trees method emphasized different topics than those on forecasting platforms
(08:05) We found weak evidence that superforecasters and experts value different types of questions
(10:06) The conditional trees method still has disadvantages
(11:06) Key takeaways
(12:30) Key outputs
(13:59) Limitations of our research
(14:49) Next steps
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First published:
August 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iMmpeCmfBk9sm6aLJ/conditional-trees-generating-informative-forecasting
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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For two decades, I did a lot of public outreach: talking with people from the broad or general public (on the streets,…) to persuade them to do something good. Now I believe that most of such public outreach is not so effective, with one or a few exceptions. Here I want to give a concrete example of a public outreach that I believe to be one of the most cost-effective, generating the highest impact at the lowest costs: small-farmed-animal reducetarian deep questioning. This involves asking specific questions to make people think more deeply about the welfare of (small) animals used for food in order to encourage them to reduce their consumption of animal products (primarily from small animals such as chickens, fish and shrimp). I’ll first discuss why I think this is a top-effective strategy, and then present a specific example of a list of questions that I ask [...]
Outline:
(01:00) Why is small-farmed-animal reducetarian deep questioning a top-effective public outreach?
(10:06) An example of deep questioning outreach
First published:
August 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rJiGhuinQrqaq2CQE/a-top-effective-public-outreach-small-farmed-animal
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As part of ongoing research into EA community attitudes and priorities, a supplemental EA community survey was fielded from December 2023 to January 2024. This survey included a number of questions requested by EA decision-makers and researchers. One such question concerned EA community attitudes regarding time preferences for impact. The question requested was:
Putting aside issues of tractability, what are your time preferences with respect to the altruistic impacts of your actions?
- I am at least roughly indifferent between benefiting someone today and benefiting someone to an equal extent indefinitely far in the future.
- I value benefiting someone today more than benefiting someone to an equal extent in the future, and the value I place on future benefits declines roughly exponentially per year by ___%.
- I value helping someone today less than helping someone to an equal extent in the future, and the value I place on future [...]
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First published:
August 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DncphHoNnmKj685ya/time-preferences-for-impact-in-the-ea-community-data-from
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This is a link post. Summary: In his most recent post (“Altruism and Vitalism as Fellow Travelers”), Scott Alexander tries to reconcile EA-style altruism with Nietzschean “vitalism.” He claims that the philosophies argue for different goals only in extreme cases, while having similar goals in reality. But his definition of vitalism misses the point: the goal isn’t to increase vital traits in the population, but to uplift rather than impede the vital type of person. So he fails to realize that the philosophies have different goals even in reality. They can still be reconciled but not in the way he thinks.
Definitions
The problem comes from his definitions:
Define altruism as “try to increase happiness and decrease suffering across a society” and vitalism as “try to increase strength and decrease weakness across a society”, where “strength” is defined as ability to achieve goals (and, in a tie-breaker, ability to win [...]
Outline:
(00:44) Definitions
(02:40) Differences
(04:05) Synthesis
First published:
August 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/prwd9rEKLKCwLyJjv/altruism-and-vitalism-aren-t-fellow-travelers
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I put together this reading list on AI agents, with a tilt more towards AI governance. I hope it may be of help to others working on this area. If you know of other great resources or have comments on these resources, please say so in the comments!
Top priority papers:
- OpenAI – Practices for Governing Agentic AI Systems
- OpenAI – Research into Agentic AI Systems
- Deepmind – The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants
- Alan Chan et. al – Visibility into AI Agents (see also)
A bit about the agents that currently exist:
- VisualWebArena: EVALUATING MULTIMODAL AGENTS ON REALISTIC VISUAL WEB TASKS
- WebVoyager : Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models
- METR: An update on our general capability evaluations
Good background:
- METR – Autonomous replication threat models
- Evaluating Frontier Models for Dangerous Capabilities
- Introduction to Cooperative AI
- Governing AI Agents
- Peter's thoughts on AI loss of [...]
First published:
August 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HYuoSzfHyuKrCGHrn/reading-list-on-ai-agents-and-associated-policy
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While the effective altruism movement has changed a lot over time, oneof the parts that makes me most disappointed is the steadycreep of donation matching. It's not that donation matching isobjectively very important, but the early EA movement'sprincipledrejection of a very effective fundraising strategy made it clearthat we were committed to helping people understand the real impact oftheir donations. Over time, as people have specialized into differentareas of EA, with community-building and epistemics being differentpeople from fundraising, we've become less robust against thereal-world incentives of "donation matching works".
Personally, I would love to see a community-wide norm against EAorganizations setting up donation matches. Yes, they bring in money,but at the cost of misleading donors about their impact and unwindinga lot of what we, as a community, are trying to build. [1] To theextent that [...]
The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.
First published:
August 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9W2iWyWjfoYaGDZcG/farmkind-s-illusory-offer
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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This is a link post. ---
First published:
August 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sLwP2D6WpLMFxjEK5/new-video-from-ali-abdaal-5-74m-yt-subscribers-why-i-m
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
80,000 Hours is hiring for several positions on our team!
Rather than posting about them separately, we’re taking Toby's advice and combining them all into this “ask me anything” with the hiring managers — Bella Forristal and Huon Porteous.
Why an AMA?
We know that applying for jobs at orgs working in EA areas can be a stressful, demoralising, and confusing process.
We’ve also heard the calls for increased transparency, and clearer communication about the hiring process.
What's more, we’ve heard that opaque and intimidating processes can be especially discouraging to applicants from underrepresented backgrounds.
We’ve made various adjustments to our job descriptions and recruitment process, but we think one of the best things we can do here is talk to candidates directly to address their questions or concerns.
Speaking personally, I (Bella) think this kind of AMA might have helped me [...]
Outline:
(00:23) Why an AMA?
(01:10) What are the roles?
(02:18) AMA logistics
First published:
August 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HvJc6NfLzSfKnCeqe/ama-about-roles-at-80-000-hours
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We’re running applications to build two EAGx teams for events later this year:
- EAGxSingapore will take place 14-15 December in Singapore. Apply here to join the team.
- EAGxVirtual will take place on 15-17 November. Apply here to join the team.
The application for each event takes 15 minutes, and the deadline is Monday, August 26th at 11:59pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). We encourage you to apply ASAP, as we will review applications on a rolling basis.
About the conferences
Please see this post for more about the EAGx conference series. The application to express interest in running an event in your area is still open!
EAGxSingapore 2024
This will be the second EAGx conference in Singapore, following a very successful iteration in 2022. We are aiming to support local organizers in hosting EAGxSingapore this December.
We expect the event size to be around 200-350 attendees; the event will primarily [...]
Outline:
(00:45) About the conferences
(00:59) EAGxSingapore 2024
(01:50) EAGxVirtual 2024
(02:36) About the organizer roles
(04:28) Role logistics
(05:48) Contact
First published:
August 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c86ppbpRmduh9AQJi/apply-to-help-run-eagxsingapore-or-eagxvirtual
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This is a link post. Applications are now open for AIM's Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program in 2025, with the next round taking place in February 2025. This program provides two months of intensive training in starting a non-profit, as well as co-founder matching, seed funding access, and recommended charity ideas.
This article provides an overview of our latest recommended charity ideas, which will be available to participants in the February 2025 cohort. We will publish full research reports for each recommended idea in the coming weeks.
Recommended Charity Ideas: One Paragraph Summary
Cage-Free Farming in the Middle East
We want to see a new organization implement the most successful and well-tested intervention of the animal movement – cage-free corporate campaigns – in a new, neglected region such as the Middle East, which farms over 300 million hens every year. Cage-free campaigns are the backbone of the existing animal advocacy [...]
Outline:
(00:44) Recommended Charity Ideas: One Paragraph Summary
(00:50) Cage-Free Farming in the Middle East
(02:03) Reducing Keel Bone Fractures
(03:11) East Asian Fish Welfare
(04:19) Digital Pulmonary Rehabilitation
(05:49) Lead Research
(07:11) CBT to Prevent Crime
(08:21) A Direct Delivery Global Health Intervention (to be decided)
First published:
August 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C8JYYy6LmPnvTxHGa/our-recommended-charity-ideas-for-february-2025
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[Versão em português abaixo]
This retrospective evaluates the conference, provides feedback to the CEA events team, and offers recommendations for future organizers. It is also a report about the event and an exercise in transparency. Feedback and comments on how to enhance EA conferences in the future are welcome.
Bottom Line Up Front
The AEBr Summit 2024 was a success. It had 220 attendees who felt welcome and satisfied, generating around 850 connections at a cost of $45.45 per attendee.
- Date: June 29, 2024
- Venue: INOVA.USP, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
- The first Brazilian national EA conference
- ~220 people attended (62% were new to EA)
- 36 speakers
- 24 sessions including talks, panels, meetups, and office hours
- 5 organizations represented at the Career fair
- Feedback survey results:
- A 9,2/10 likelihood to recommend score
- An average of 6,1 new connections per person
- Photos and video!
The AEBr [...]
Outline:
(00:29) Bottom Line Up Front
(01:40) The AEBr Summit Overview
(02:56) Highlights
(04:15) Team
(05:41) Budget
(06:51) Attendees and experience
(07:42) Production
(07:46) Preparations
(08:34) Workload balance
(09:20) Marketing
(10:41) Participants Guide
(10:54) Food and catering
(12:02) Event tech
(13:04) Shortcomings
(14:53) Versão em português
(15:20) Em resumo
(16:41) Visão geral do AEBr Summit
(18:08) Destaques
(19:39) Time
(21:23) Orçamento
(22:48) Participantes e experiência
(23:48) Produção
(23:51) Preparação
(24:55) Carga de trabalho
(25:56) Marketing
(27:36) Guia do Participante
(27:52) Alimentação e catering
(29:22) Tecnologia
(30:42) Pontos fracos
The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.
First published:
August 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8QGgLQbjZLgkBN8Z6/aebr-2024-summit-retrospective
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My new book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI is available online for free at https://academic.oup.com/book/57949. Please download it! Just click on PDF to get a PDF of the whole book. Individual chapters are also available as PDFs - just click on whichever chapters you want. The book is completely free to everyone and I'm grateful for all shares and forwards.
The print book will be released on 15 August in the UK and at some later time in the US, so please consider pre-ordering it. If you pre-order directly from the OUP website, you can get 30% off by using the code AAFLYG6. With the code, it's £21/$28 (and they can deliver to other countries, as I understand it).
Here is an abstract:
Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell [...]
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rLvCxitnYutgAR54v/the-edge-of-sentience-risk-and-precaution-in-humans-other
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TLDR:
Brussels is a hotspot for AI policy and hosts several think tanks doing good work on AI safety. However, there is no established AI Safety group with paid staff that brings the community together or works on reaching out to students and professionals. For this reason, the European Network for AI Safety (ENAIS) and members from EA Belgium are teaming up to seed AI Safety Brussels.
This is a call for expressions of interest for potential collaborators to make this happen, with a wide range of ways to contribute, such as being a potential founder, policy/technical lead, volunteer, advisor, funder, etc. If you are interested in helping out in some capacity, please fill out this 2-minute form.
Potential priorities
I (Gergő) will caveat this by saying that the exact strategy (and name) of the organisation will be determined by the founding team and advisors. However, we think there [...]
Outline:
(00:05) TLDR:
(00:53) Potential priorities
(01:13) Running courses for professionals
(02:23) Seeding university groups
(02:38) Organising events, meetups and connecting the community
(03:20) Who is working on this at the moment
(04:38) On risks
(05:27) Conclusion
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EwdgPJfeieCxe4cxa/help-us-seed-ai-safety-brussels
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1. Introduction
“Value fragility,” as I’ll construe it, is the claim that slightly-different value systems tend to lead in importantly-different directions when subject to extreme optimization. I think the idea of value fragility haunts the AI risk discourse in various ways – and in particular, that it informs a backdrop prior that adequately aligning a superintelligence requires an extremely precise and sophisticated kind of technical and ethical achievement. That is, the thought goes: if you get a superintelligence's values even slightly wrong, you’re screwed.
This post is a collection of loose and not-super-organized reflections on value fragility and its role in arguments for pessimism about AI risk. I start by trying to tease apart a number of different claims in the vicinity of value fragility. In particular:
- I distinguish between questions about value fragility and questions about how different agents would converge on the same values given adequate [...]
Outline:
(00:04) 1. Introduction
(03:46) 2. Variants of value fragility
(03:57) 2.1 Some initial definitions
(09:02) 2.2 Are these claims true?
(11:23) 2.3 Value fragility in the real world
(11:59) 2.3.1 Will agent's optimize for their values on reflection, and does this matter?
(14:59) 2.3.2 Will agents optimize extremely/intensely, and does this matter?
(24:06) 2.4 Multipolar value fragility
(28:21) 2.4.1 Does multipolarity diffuse value fragility somehow?
(32:10) 3. What's the role of value fragility in the case for AI risk?
(35:43) 3.1 The value of what an AI does after taking over the world
(37:15) 3.2 Value fragility in the context of extremely-easy takeovers
(45:43) 3.3 Value fragility in cases where takeover isn’t extremely easy
(52:36) 4. The possible role of niceness and power-sharing in diffusing these dynamics
The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.
First published:
August 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fhkkScpkrLPNzsQqF/value-fragility-and-ai-takeover
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Our room for more funding is bigger and more urgent than ever before. Our organizational strategy will be responsive both to the total amount raised and to how many people donate, so smaller donors will have an especially high impact this year.
Good Ventures recently decided to phase out funding for several areas (GV blog, EA Forum post), including wild animal welfare. That's a pretty big shock to our movement. We don’t know what exactly the impact will be, except that it's complicated. The purpose of this post is to share what we know and how we’re thinking about things — primarily to encourage people to donate to Wild Animal Initiative this year, but also for anyone else who might be interested in the state of the wild animal welfare movement more broadly.
Summary
Track record
- Our primary goal is to support the growth of a [...]
Outline:
(00:53) Summary
(03:44) What we’ve accomplished so far
(03:48) Background
(04:12) Strategy
(05:39) Progress
(11:56) Why we need more funding, especially from smaller donors
(12:02) We always have room to grow, but now we need to make sure we don’t shrink.
(13:11) We raised less last year than we did the year before.
(13:59) We’re losing our biggest donor.
(16:37) Another donor could make up the funds, but not the security.
(18:25) Smaller donors have a bigger role to play.
(20:04) What we’ll do with your donation
(24:15) Conclusion
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/idhTjyNTsyxobijyJ/wild-animal-initiative-has-urgent-need-for-more-funding-and
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Someone suggested I name this post "What We Owe The Community": I think it's a great title, but I didn't dare use it...
Views and mistakes my own.
What I believe
I think owning our EA affiliation—how we are inspired by the movement and the community—is net positive for the world and our careers. If more people were more outspoken about their alignment with EA principles and proximity to the EA community, we would all be better off. While there may be legitimate reasons for some individuals to not publicly identify as part of the EA movement, this can create a “free-rider problem”. If too many people choose to passively benefit from EA without openly supporting it, the overall movement and community may suffer from it.
Why I think more people should own their EA affiliation publicly
I understand why one doesn’t, but I’d probably not support it in [...]
Outline:
(00:15) What I believe
(00:51) Why I think more people should own their EA affiliation publicly
(01:11) The risks
(01:40) A prisoner's dilemma
(02:22) Tipping points
(03:26) On transparency
(05:18) Where I come from
(05:22) Event branding
(06:01) Getting hired
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TLKFfXJ4gPeXDkBC9/on-owning-our-ea-affiliation
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This article was originally written for my LinkedIn audience, which includes individuals from varying levels of familiarity with Effective Altruism. The explanations and context are provided accordingly.
I am incredibly grateful to have received a scholarship that funded my university studies from a bachelor's to a Ph.D. The financial support I received not only eased my education but also made me reflect on how I could extend this privilege to others. Today, I am thrilled to share that I have reached my goal of donating the full amount of my scholarship's value to effective charities. Here's an overview of what inspired me, what lies ahead, and how you can get involved.
my dad and me on the first day of my master studies in Cambridge, UK Why Give Back?
Recognising our own financial privilege can be eye-opening and humbling. Many of us enjoy a level of wealth that far exceeds [...]
Outline:
(00:54) Why Give Back?
(01:50) Choosing Effective Charities
(02:20) My giving has impacted 50,000 lives
(02:45) Continuing My Journey
(03:34) How You Can Make a Difference
(04:43) Conclusion
(05:18) More about High Impact Professionals
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/F9ejHHg2sYKs4RCvC/turning-privilege-into-effective-donations
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TL;DR
- FarmKind is a new effective giving platform dedicated to tackling factory farming
- We’ve just launched - www.farmkind.giving
- There are many ways you can help us if you’re interested - details below
FarmKind's aim
Factory farming is one of the most neglected cause areas relative to the amount of suffering it causes. Globally, Farmed Animal Funders estimates that just $200 million is channeled specifically to this issue,[1] while more than 10 billion land animals (excluding insects) are factory farmed annually in the US alone.[2]
Even when it comes to effective altruism, factory farming is a minority within a minority. We estimate that less than 10% of the funds raised by effective giving organizations go to factory farming.[3]
All this despite the fact that proven interventions in the lives of factory-farmed animals remain arguably some of the most cost-effective ways to prevent suffering that we have yet [...]
Outline:
(00:08) TL;DR
(00:26) FarmKind's aim
(02:39) Our story so far
(03:29) DON’T donate though us (please)
(04:58) How you can help
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
August 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/D3Gqv9oiDkbmRgGJe/farmkind-a-new-animal-fundraising-platform-is-live-please
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Apply Here!
EAGxIndia 2024 will be held at The Conrad, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. The conference aims to help attendees in the region find and accelerate their path to positive impact, using EA principles to foster connections and growth opportunities.
In 2023, 163 attendees participated in the first EAGxIndia, with 70% from India and others from the UK, US, Singapore, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Brazil. This event enriched the local community with domestic and international connections, catalyzed movement growth, and had multiple reports of attendees transitioning into new impactful careers as a direct result of the conference. We are excited to build on these successes with a second, larger conference in just a few months!
Basics of EAGx and effective altruism:
EAGx (Effective Altruism Global X) is a series of regionally focused events uniting the global EA community, supported by the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and organized by [...]
Outline:
(01:33) Basics of EAGx and effective altruism:
(03:02) Why attend?
(03:49) Why India and Bengaluru?
(04:55) Should you apply?
(05:53) Schedule
(06:24) Application details
(06:37) Travel support
(07:02) Accessibility
(07:49) Meet the team
(10:11) Contact us
The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.
First published:
August 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tow3X7GQKZzKPMPad/join-us-at-eagxindia-2024-in-bengaluru-on-19-20-october-2024
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One year ago, the EA Forum team ran a survey for EA Forum users. The results have been very helpful for us to clarify our strategy, understand our impact, and decide what to prioritize working on in the past 12 months.
From today through August 20[1], we’re running an updated version of the survey for 2024. All questions are optional, as is a new section about other CEA programs.
We estimate the survey will take you 7-15 minutes to complete (less if you skip questions, longer if you write particularly detailed answers). Your answers will be saved in your browser, so you can pause and return to it later.
Take the survey We appreciate you taking the time to fill out the survey, and we read every response. Even if you do not use the Forum, your response is helpful for us to compare different populations (and you will [...]
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tztgWcmCbenFoESTp/take-the-2024-ea-forum-user-survey
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We just published an interview: Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government. Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
… if you’re a power that is an island and that goes by sea, then you’re more likely to do things like valuing freedom, being democratic, being pro-foreigner, being open-minded, being interested in trade. If you are on the Mongolian steppes, then your entire mindset is kill or be killed, conquer or be conquered … the breeding ground for basically everything that all of us consider to be dystopian governance.
If you want more utopian governance and less dystopian governance, then find ways to basically change the landscape, to try to make the world look more like mountains and rivers and [...]
Outline:
(00:31) Episode summary
(04:19) Highlights
(04:22) Vitaliks d/acc alternative
(08:49) Biodefence
(12:41) How much do people actually disagree?
(18:17) Distrust of authority is a big deal
(22:14) Info defence and Xs Community Notes
(27:42) Quadratic voting and funding
(31:35) Vitaliks philosophy of half-assing everything
First published:
July 31st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tc7z9tA55i2ScZS7Z/194-defensive-acceleration-and-how-to-regulate-ai-when-you
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This is a link post. ---
First published:
July 31st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/w3zGFaFmfub2GpjCc/how-the-open-wing-alliance-has-helped-free-hundreds-of
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I wrote an initial draft of this post much closer to the Manifest controversy earlier this summer. Although I got sidetracked and it took a while to finish, I still think this is a conversation worth having; perhaps it would even be better to have it now since calmer heads have had time to prevail.
I can’t in good faith deny being an effective altruist. I’ve worked at EA organizations, I believe many of the core tenants of the movement, and thinking about optimizing my impact by EA lights has guided every major career decision I’ve made since early 2021. And yet I am ashamed to identify myself as such in polite society. Someone at a party recently guessed that I was an EA after I said I was interested in animal welfare litigation or maybe AI governance; I laughed awkwardly, said yeah maybe [...]
Outline:
(03:49) Why might one tolerate this?
(09:31) Why does it have to be this thing in particular?
(12:50) On the subject of good faith
(15:19) Where do we go from here?
The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MCxtGbzeyfFDmrJZx/ea-should-unequivocally-condemn-race-science
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As a Psychology and Behavioural Sciences MSc student, I care about deepening the understanding of the underlying psychological and behavioural factors that facilitate and hinder altruism and pro-social behaviour. I am particularly interested in questions like: What makes people care about a certain global issue or cause? What drives people to engage in altruistic behaviours? What incentives and barriers exist for effective giving and pledging? By seeking and applying answers to these questions, I hope to make a meaningful impact.
In line with Giving What We Can (GWWC)'s desire to make their work more evidence-based, we are conducting a study to better understand how to encourage more people around the world to donate to highly effective charities. We recognize that giving and pledging are not always the best ways for everyone to have an impact and that various factors can either facilitate or hinder effective giving and pledging. Therefore [...]
First published:
July 31st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EY3MDdjkfy8njaL2w/survey-on-barriers-and-facilitators-for-effective-giving-and
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This is a video and transcript of an AMA with Darren Margolias, the Executive Director of Beast Philanthropy. The interviewer is CEA's Emma Richter. See the questions Darren is answering in the AMA announcement post.
If you'd like to support the Beast Philanthropy x GiveDirectly collaboration, you can donate here. The first $150,000 of donations will be matched. GiveDirectly shares their thinking on donation matching here.
Video AMA- Emma interviews Darren
Short transcript
This transcript was cleaned up and shortened by ChatGPT. To my eye it seems to accurately represent Emma's questions and Darren's answers, but I've included the full, un-edited transcript at the end of this post so that you can cross-reference, get accurate quotes from Darren, or look for more detail. All errors in the GPT summary are my (Toby's) own (by a transitive property).
Emma
Hello everyone, I'm Emma from CEA. Welcome to [...]
Outline:
(00:39) Video AMA- Emma interviews Darren
(00:47) Short transcript
(18:51) Full, more accurate, transcript
First published:
July 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nbuQdeiCEXDJxcj5a/video-ama-and-transcript-beast-philanthropy-s-darren
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This is a link post. Some thoughts on open-source AI (copied over from a recent twitter thread):
-
We should have a strong prior favoring open source. It's been a huge success driving tech progress over many decades. We forget how counterintuitive it was originally, and shouldn’t take it for granted.
-
Open source has also been very valuable for alignment. It's key to progress on interpretability, as outlined here.
-
I am concerned, however, that offense will heavily outpace defense in the long term. As AI accelerates science, many new WMDs will emerge. Even if defense of infrastructure keeps up with offense, human bodies are a roughly fixed and very vulnerable attack surface.
-
A central concern about open source AI: it’ll allow terrorists to build bioweapons. This shouldn’t be dismissed, but IMO it's easy to be disproportionately scared of terrorism. More central risks are eg “North Korea becomes [...]
First published:
July 31st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YBYDFm4qDKutbNrCp/twitter-thread-on-open-source-ai
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Rethink Priorities’ Worldview Investigation Team (WIT) will run an Ask Me Anything (AMA). We’ll reply on the 7th and 8th of August. Please put your questions in the comments below!
What's WIT?
WIT is Hayley Clatterbuck, Bob Fischer, Arvo Munoz Moran, David Moss, and Derek Shiller. Our team exists to improve resource allocation within and beyond the effective altruism movement, focusing on tractable, high-impact questions that bear on strategic priorities. We try to take action-relevant philosophical, methodological, and strategic problems and turn them into manageable, modelable problems. Our projects have included:
- The Moral Weight Project. If we want to do as much good as possible, we have to compare all the ways of doing good—including ways that involve helping members of different species. This sequence collects Rethink Priorities' work on cause prioritization across different kinds of animals, human and nonhuman. (You can check out the book version here.)
- [...]
Outline:
(00:22) What's WIT?
(02:08) What should you ask us?
(02:36) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 31st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ipxePnfnxsRuasZW2/ama-rethink-priorities-worldview-investigation-team
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This is a link post. Epistemic status: raising concerns, rather than stating confident conclusions.
I’m worried that a lot of work on AI safety evals matches the pattern of “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done.” Or, to put it another way: I judge eval ideas on 4 criteria, and I often see proposals which fail all 4. The criteria:
- Possible to measure with scientific rigor.
Some things can be easily studied in a lab; others are entangled with a lot of real-world complexity. If you predict the latter (e.g. a model's economic or scientific impact) based on model-level evals, your results will often be BS.
(This is why I dislike the term “transformative AI”, by the way. Whether an AI has transformative effects on society will depend hugely on what the society is like, how the AI is deployed, etc. And that's a [...]
First published:
July 31st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JW9dJ2FPAGxK8b3Qn/twitter-thread-on-ai-safety-evals
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Tl;dr:
I identified 15 pieces of advice that I wish knew earlier in my animal advocacy career, and provided personal stories to show how they were relevant in my life. This article will be most useful for early career professionals, especially those considering roles in animal advocacy, and people who like reading personal accounts.
- Choose work experience over post-Bachelor's education when possible
- Start doing relevant work, even if unpaid, to showcase skills and test fit
- Be open to changing jobs for better opportunities, but consider financial security
- Use current jobs to build career capital for future animal advocacy roles
- Consider earning to give as a way to support the movement financially
- Offer concrete skills to solve specific problems when seeking roles
- Network actively, including with senior people, and learn to ask good questions
- Seek growth opportunities beyond what your employer provides
- Don't be afraid to be ambitious [...]
Outline:
(03:38) Getting work:
(03:41) Choose work experience over post-Bachelor's education
(05:25) Sometimes you just have to start doing something
(08:36) Don’t be afraid of leaving your job for other opportunities (with caveats!)
(12:42) Your current/next job can be for career capital
(14:56) Consider earning to give
(18:03) Offer a concrete skill or solution to those who need it
(20:02) Maximising your growth
(20:06) Speak to people outside of your organisation and learn what's going on in the movement.
(22:36) Start building your network as soon as possible (including very senior people) and learn to ask good questions
(25:35) Ask your employer to help you grow. If they don’t, help yourself.
(26:44) Don’t be afraid to be ambitious (if you want to be) and you don’t always have to follow other people's advice
(28:23) Don’t take rejections too seriously or personally
(30:37) Invest in improving your productivity
(31:30) Logistics and “boring stuff” I wish I knew starting out as an animal advocate
(31:37) Spend more time with your family and friends: there is always more work to be done
(34:04) Prioritise your physical and mental health
(35:51) Even if your salary is low, consider putting money towards your pension, emergency fund, buying a house and other big purchases
(36:16) Pension
(39:11) Buying a house
(41:06) Having a solid emergency fund
(41:59) Budgeting and learning how to save money
The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JtExMoxdkSfiajiwo/what-i-wish-i-knew-when-i-started-out-in-animal-advocacy
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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This is a link post. Executive Summary
Plenty of attention rests on artificial intelligence developers’ non-technical contributions to ensuring safe development of advanced AI: Their corporate structure, their internal guidelines (‘RSPs’), and their work on policy. We argue that strong profitability incentives increasingly force these efforts into ineffectiveness. As a result, less hope should be placed on AI corporations’ internal governance, and more scrutiny should be afforded to their policy contributions.
TL;DR
Only Profit-Maximizers Stay At The Frontier
- Investors and compute providers have extensive leverage over labs and need to justify enormous spending
- As a result, leading AI corporations are forced to maximize profits
- This leads them to advocate against external regulatory constraints or shape them in their favor
Constraints from Corporate Structure Are Dangerously Ineffective
- Ostensibly binding corporate structures are easily evaded or abandoned
- Political and public will cannot be enforced or ensured via corporate structure
- [...]
Outline:
(00:09) Executive Summary
(00:41) TL;DR
(02:14) Introduction
(04:13) Only Profit-Maximizers Stay At The Frontier
(09:48) Constraints from Corporate Structure Are Dangerously Ineffective
(13:12) Hope In RSPs Is Misguided
(17:58) For-Profit Policy Work Is Called Corporate Lobbying
(24:09) Conclusion
First published:
July 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6K3Azzhqboiqjt7tX/corporate-ai-labs-odd-role-in-their-own-governance
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Summary
- Consider a pill that would cause a happy person with a fulfilling life to abandon their most important desires and cherished attachments, including goals, career and loved ones, but increase their lifetime subjective well-being. If what's best for someone is just higher subjective well-being (including even higher lifetime preference/desire satisfaction), then it would be better for them to take the pill. However, it seems to me that if they prefer not to take such a pill, to honour their current specific desires and attachments, it could be worse for them to take it (more).
- I anticipate some responses and reply to them:
- People aren’t always right about what's best for themselves. R: That's true, but attitude manipulation is quite different from other cases, where individuals neglect, discount or otherwise misweigh attitudes they do or will have (more).
- Deontological constraints against involuntary manipulation. R: Deontological constraints could oddly [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Summary
(02:26) Acknowledgements
(02:45) Manipulating desires and abandoning attachments
(10:49) Responses and replies
(10:53) People aren’t always right about what's best for themselves
(13:22) Deontological constraints
(14:38) Indirect reasons
(15:56) Incomparability
(17:18) Why should I care?
(18:30) Avoiding manipulation with preference-affecting views
The original text contained 18 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/erPPy3A3uG7HEdKzu/utilitarianism-and-the-replaceability-of-desires-and
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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I asked the Constellation Slack channel how the technical AIS landscape has changed since I last spent substantial time in the Bay Area (September 2023), and I figured it would be useful to post this (with the permission of the contributors to either post with or without attribution). Curious if commenters agree or would propose additional changes!
This conversation has been lightly edited to preserve anonymity.
Me: One reason I wanted to spend a few weeks in Constellation was to sort of absorb-through-osmosis how the technical AI safety landscape has evolved since I last spent substantial time here in September 2023, but it seems more productive to just ask here "how has the technical AIS landscape evolved since September 2023?" and then have conversations armed with that knowledge. The flavor of this question is like, what are the technical directions and strategies people are most excited about, do we [...]
First published:
July 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zsMnxJpeiiytDrAss/how-the-ai-safety-technical-landscape-has-changed-in-the
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The purpose of this post is to share data from a survey that the EA Forum team ran last year. Though we used this survey as one of many sources of information for internal analyses, I did not include any particular takeaways from this survey data in this post. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Overview
In August 2023, the EA Forum team ran a survey to learn more about how people use the Forum and how the Forum impacted them. We got 609 valid responses.
Thank you to everyone who responded - we really appreciate you taking the time. The results have been important for helping us understand the ways that the Forum creates value and disvalue that are otherwise hard for us to track. We’ve used it to evaluate the impact of the Forum and the marginal impact of our work, update our team's [...]
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 10 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6hxMxCf3zcmfjtKeK/data-from-the-2023-ea-forum-user-survey
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Some rewards and challenges of working as an EA NYC community builder over the past two years
Motivations
I wanted to share these thoughts for a few reasons:
- I hope this serves as a reference point for people considering careers in EA community building (though this is only one reference point, of course).
- EA NYC is hiring an Executive Director! If you're interested, apply here by the end of July 28th (Eastern Time).
- I think there's often value in people discussing their jobs.[1]
By the way, I have a few relevant disclaimers/caveats that I encourage you to check out at the bottom of this post. For now, I'd just like to say that I'm writing this in a personal capacity and do not claim to represent the views of any of my employers, past, present, or future.
Otherwise, I may occasionally update this post to correct any misleading/inaccurate [...]
The original text contained 19 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6jwMHczhX6ZXRMe7D/my-experience-as-a-full-time-ea-community-builder-in-nyc
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This post lays out a framework I’m currently using for thinking about when AI systems will seek power in problematic ways. I think this framework adds useful structure to the too-often-left-amorphous “instrumental convergence thesis,” and that it helps us recast the classic argument for existential risk from misaligned AI in a revealing way. In particular, I suggest, this recasting highlights how much classic analyses of AI risk load on the assumption that the AIs in question are powerful enough to take over the world very easily, via a wide variety of paths. If we relax this assumption, I suggest, the strategic trade-offs that an AI faces, in choosing whether or not to engage in some form of problematic power-seeking, become substantially more complex.
Prerequisites for rational takeover-seeking
For simplicity, I’ll focus here on the most extreme type of problematic AI power-seeking – namely, an AI or set of [...]
The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dZ2WvJierisi8jzFi/a-framework-for-thinking-about-ai-power-seeking
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Version 1.1 - July 2024
Thanks to everyone who contributed directly or indirectly, e.g. our board, our peers from the Community Building Grants Program, our group organizers and community members.
Overview
This document offers an overview of the strategic vision for EA Switzerland. It is intended to be aspirational—a resource to guide our thinking when we consider our work on a higher level. We intend to review this document yearly. In this document, “we” is EA Switzerland's team.
Who?
- We start with a brief history of EA Switzerland.
- Then, we follow with an analysis of the characteristics of Switzerland, and in particular the EA Switzerland subcommunity, that we anticipate to be comparative advantages and disadvantages.
- We describe our values as an association and a community.
Why?
In this section, we describe our approach to Effective Altruism (EA) and community building.
- We lay out our framework, based on the definition of EA [...]
Outline:
(00:22) Overview
(02:52) Who? - EA Switzerland
(02:56) Our History
(03:24) Our Comparative Advantages and Disadvantages
(03:30) Financial Comfort and Wealth
(05:22) Multicultural Community and International Hub
(06:38) Low Emigration
(07:49) Our Values
(09:32) Why? - Our approach to Effective Altruism and community building
(09:39) Our Framework
(09:50) Trajectories: What are people's journey to impact?
(13:07) Tracks: What structures do we build to support people in their journey?
(16:47) Our Priorities
(16:51) Track Portfolio
(19:06) Operational Work
(19:44) What? - Activities we want to be doing
(19:49) Our Theory of Change
(20:34) Annual Calendar
(21:02) Resources
(21:29) How? - Processes we follow
(21:36) Staff Handbook
(21:39) Impact Framework
(22:22) Team Framework
(24:17) Logistics
(24:28) Operational Handbook
(24:40) Annexes
(24:43) Annex 1: Strategizing Considerations
(24:49) Funding Considerations
(26:51) Additional Considerations
(28:33) Annex 2: Maintain and Improve vs. Develop and Create
(30:49) Annex 3: Social Support Ecosystems and EA Community Building
(33:23) Annex 4: Team Dynamics - Details
(37:05) Glossary
The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dFFt62acoktuLDCvh/ea-switzerland-strategy-v2024
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Very short post. This is not my area of expertise at all. But it seems like an opportunity.
The Olympics start this week. In the UK, the biggest Olympic story is not about any runner or swimmer or gymnast. It is about animal rights. But, as with most animal-rights stories which make the front-pages (bull-fighting, hunting), it misses the real problem, factory-farming.
The story: Apparently a famous Olympian equestrian has been forced to withdraw from the Olympics after footage emerged of her whipping a horse during training, 4 years ago. Cue the standard apologies, the "error of judgment" comment, the universal condemnation - and of course the video is shared with a warning that people might find this shocking.
I think it would be wonderful if someone with the right moral stature (which is not me, I'm not even a vegan ...) were to [...]
First published:
July 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KzZ9Qt4RTyJeb4s85/it-s-ok-to-kill-and-eat-animals-but-don-t-get-caught
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Highlights since our last feature update:
- People directory
- Google Doc import
- Card view for the Frontpage
- User profile updates
- Updates to sequences
We've also hosted 3 events, significantly improved the site speed, and made many more improvements across the Forum.
As always, we'd love feedback on these changes.
People directory
We’ve built a filterable database where anyone can find Forum users they might want to hire, collaborate with, or read.
You can filter the database by role, organization, interests and more.
If you want people to easily find you, consider adding more information to your Forum profile.
Google Doc import
You can now import posts directly from Google Docs. Footnotes and images will be imported along with the text.
How it works:
- Write and format your post in Google Docs
- Share the Google doc with eaforum.posts@gmail.com
- Copy the link to [...]
Outline:
(00:41) People directory
(01:12) Google Doc import
(01:58) Card view for the Frontpage
(02:23) User profile updates
(03:12) Updates to sequences
(03:35) Other updates
(03:40) Forum performance is greatly improved
(04:05) Improved on-site audio experience
(04:39) We’ve fixed our Twitter bot
(05:18) Updated UI for post stats
(05:37) Self-service account deletion
(05:57) Events since March
(06:02) Draft Amnesty Week
(06:24) Ways the world is getting better banner
(06:53) AI Welfare Debate Week
(07:25) Bonus: April Fools
(07:40) Share your feedback
The original text contained 14 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h2Gcxgvezf8io8mqr/forum-update-user-database-card-view-and-more-jul-2024
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Summary
What are my goals? And what did I find?
- Are cross cultural interactions (CCIs) in EA even an issue for non-Western EAs who attended the retreat?
- It's more likely than not that they had experienced at least one mildly-to-moderately bad interaction. These are usually more subtle and unintentional.
- It's very unlikely that they had experienced an extremely bad interaction.
- It's very likely that their interactions are mostly positive.
- How widespread is it?
- Uncertain, but probably yes.
Methodology
I thought a retreat that happened before EAGxPhilippines was a good opportunity to talk to a bunch of non-Western EAs, so I ran a focus group session as a way to solicit people's experiences of CCIs in EA settings.
The rules I enforced during that time were:
- To use Chatham house rule when talking about the session to others
- To keep our shared notes anonymised
- To differentiate [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Summary
(00:48) Methodology
(01:24) Results
(01:28) Negative experiences
(01:52) Positive experiences
(02:08) Limitations
(03:24) Appendix
(03:28) Non-cross-cultural related or uncertain-if-it-is-cross-cultural related experiences
First published:
July 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hEMkbJR3o5cqSgR7F/focus-group-study-of-non-western-eas-experiences-with
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Introducing the tools
How can we optimize our charitable giving while accounting for complex factors about effectiveness and philosophy?
Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigations Team developed two free tools to help address this question:
- The portfolio builder
- The moral parliament simulation
Both tools are described in the new Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools (CRAFT) Sequence, which is a part of the Team's ongoing efforts to improve resource allocations.
Learn more
Join Rethink Priorities' Senior Research Manager Bob Fischer and Researcher Arvo Muñoz Morán for a virtual workshop on how to use these new tools. The one-hour event will cover:
• An overview of why the CRAFT Sequence tools were developed.
• A virtual walkthrough of the Portfolio Builder Tool and the Moral Parliament Tool.
• A practical session on how you can apply these tools to your own giving strategies.
• A question-and-answer session to address [...]
Outline:
(00:07) Introducing the tools
(00:43) Learn more
(01:26) Details
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YqdhkfmZA7nHGJFkj/webinar-how-to-use-rethink-priorities-new-effective-giving
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Summary
In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs’ perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically:
- How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues;
- What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced;
- How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings.
To do that, I collected an array of evidence from seven sources (e.g., anecdotes from interviews and a focus group, and some statistics from three surveys not done by me). And based on the evidence on CCIs I have collected so far, I believe that poor CCIs are likely to be a common but minor problem for most non-westerners in the EA community.
At the organisational or community level, I would not flag CCI issues as something to be heavily prioritised (moderate confidence), but I would recommend EA-aligned organisations and organisers to start or maintain interventions that are sensible or if the trade-offs are acceptable, like some of [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Summary
(01:32) Background
(02:49) Evidence compiled
(02:53) Evidence that might indicate less negative CCIs
(02:58) 1. EA Survey 2022
(04:09) Evidence that might indicate more negative CCIs
(04:14) 1. My personal experience
(05:43) 2. Focus group study of Non-Western EAs’ experiences with Western EAs
(05:59) 3. Community Health Survey 2023-2024
(06:42) 4. [redacted]'s experience
(07:04) 5. Feedback surveys from EA Globals in 2023
(08:06) 6. Interviews to understand Non-Western EAs’ perception of cross cultural interactions they had with Western EAs
(08:30) Limitations
(10:16) Conclusion
(11:44) Recommendations
(12:28) Further research
(13:50) Acknowledgements
(14:16) Appendix
(14:20) Definitions
(14:23) Western and non-Western
(16:05) Subtle acts of exclusions (SAEs)
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QnGbP3bx2Ly5ksDdx/evidence-of-poor-cross-cultural-interactions-in-the-ea
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Summary
Rebecca Kagan believes “EA needs an investigation, done externally and shared publicly, on mistakes made in the EA community's relationship with FTX.” She is far from the only person who has called for an independent investigation, but Kagan's experience and knowledge as a former board member of Effective Ventures makes her perspective particularly relevant.
Explaining her decision to resign from EV's board, Kagan wrote:
“I want to make it clear that I resigned last year due to significant disagreements with the board of EV and EA leadership, particularly concerning their actions leading up to and after the FTX crisis… I believe there were extensive and significant mistakes made which have not been addressed. (In particular, some EA leaders had warning signs about SBF that they ignored, and instead promoted him as a good person, tied the EA community to FTX, and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations [...]
Outline:
(00:08) Summary
(06:11) Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters.
(06:45) Circa ~2017, SBF was one of 80k and CEA's largest donors.
(08:30) SBF served on CEA's board.
(09:00) SBF worked for CEA.
(09:20) Multiple EA leaders and organizations were aware about allegations stemming from the Alameda dispute.
(10:24) Open questions:
(11:37) There are worrisome discrepancies between comments from EA leaders and credible media reports.
(12:01) Will's professed ignorance about inappropriate romantic relationships SBF had while at Alameda directly conflicts with Time's reporting on the subject.
(12:57) Will's characterization of what complaints he heard about SBF related to the Alameda dispute, and when he heard them, conflicts with Time's reporting
(14:52) Nobody in EA leadership has publicly acknowledged the New Yorker's report that many leaders received warnings that SBF was being investigated for criminal behavior four months before FTX's collapse (other than to deny personally having seen said warnings)
(16:27) EA leadership has not acknowledged an internal CEA investigation and/or board assessment conducted relating to Alameda, which both Time and Semafor have reported
(18:00) Open questions:
(20:49) EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading
(22:49) Open questions
The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P9phn7uhjiCvaCPDZ/we-need-an-independent-investigation-into-how-ea-leadership
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This is a link post. This Vox article by Dylan Matthews provides an excellent overview of why funding Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, is one of the most impactful things the US government does. Gavi has a proven track record of cost-effectively saving millions of lives by providing access to essential vaccines in the world's poorest countries.
Gavi is currently seeking $9billion in funding for its 2026-2030 budget, which includes over $1 billion for the newly approved malaria vaccines. Despite some concerns about "donor fatigue," there appears to be strong bipartisan support in Congress for meeting or even exceeding the Biden administration's $1.58 billion pledge to Gavi.
However, the article argues that even this level of funding may not be sufficient to fully take advantage of the new malaria vaccines' potential. With more support, Gavi could theoretically vaccinate up to 29 million children per year against malaria.
First published:
July 18th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BQhcQSKk2SspgBu7F/the-most-crucial-part-of-next-year-s-federal-budget
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Summary
I investigated non-Western EAs’ perception of cross cultural interactions (CCIs) they had with Westerners, specifically:
- Whether or not non-Westerners experienced CCI issues, and how often;
- How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings;
- What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced.
I interviewed 21 non-Western EAs (selected from an EA conference's Swapcard and a few from my own personal network) and discovered:
- An overwhelming number of interviewees (19 out of 21) thought their cross-cultural interactions in EA settings were almost all neutral or positive.
- However, among the same 19 interviewees who found their CCIs to be mostly neutral or positive, they’ve also reported the following:
- 43% (9 out of 19) reported at least one general negative CCI
- 48% (10 out of 19) reported at least one SAE caused by Western EAs
- 19% (4 out of 19) reported at least one SAE caused by [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Summary
(03:12) Methodology
(05:58) Results
(06:01) 1. Do non-Westerners experience CCI issues? And how many?
(07:20) 2. How do CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings?
(08:05) 3. What kinds of SAEs do interviewees experience?
(08:11) Highlighted negative vignettes
(12:45) Highlighted positive vignettes
(13:59) Highlighted neutral vignettes
(14:18) CCIs interviewees reported and their frequency
(15:17) Demographics of interviewees
(15:21) Gender
(15:38) Locale
(16:16) Limitations
(18:22) Appendix
(18:25) Definition of subtle acts of exclusion
(19:21) Vignettes
(19:24) B
(20:48) C
(21:26) D
(22:00) F
(22:26) G
(22:58) H
(23:47) J
(24:33) K
(26:10) L
(27:34) M
(29:03) N
(29:29) P
(30:33) Q
(30:54) R
(32:09) S
(32:53) T
(33:59) V
(35:30) W
(36:25) X
(37:07) Y
(37:49) Z
The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jEvbQmKw6ZFkaHwZf/non-western-eas-perception-of-cross-cultural-interactions
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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We from Vida Plena are proud to present our first Annual Impact Report.
2023 was our first full year. It was a year of learning. We had just finished a successful pilot and started the year with the mission of building a solid foundation and proving that our therapy model works at scale.
This first annual impact report is our attempt to capture through charts and graphs bits of crucial evidence about who we’ve helped in 2023 and where we can continue to improve.
Background Context
Vida Plena (meaning ‘a flourishing life’ in Spanish) is a nonprofit organization based in Quito, Ecuador which launched in 2022 (see our launch post here).
Our mission is to build strong mental health in low-income and refugee communities, who otherwise would have no access to care. We provide evidence-based depression treatment using group interpersonal therapy, which is highly cost-effective and [...]
Outline:
(00:46) Background Context
(01:20) Main Findings
(03:02) Challenges
(03:52) Limitations
(05:22) Next Steps for Our Work
(06:14) Read the Full Report
(06:30) Acknowledgments
(07:15) We would love to stay in touch and keep you up to date with our work
The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2Nmz28rrJBRtpWJBh/vida-plena-s-2023-impact-report-measuring-progress-and
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On July 30th, Peter Singer will be answering your questions in a Forum AMA. He has agreed to answer questions for an hour in the evening (Melbourne time), so if your question hasn’t been answered by the 31st, it likely won’t be.
Singer needs little introduction for many people in the Forum. In fact, it is fairly likely that his work was the reason we first heard about effective altruism. However, I’ve included some information here to orient your questions, if you’d benefit from it.
What Singer has been up to recently
Singer retired from his Princeton professorship recently, ending with a conference celebrating his work (written about by Richard Chappell here— I also recommend this post as a place to start looking for questions to ask Singer).
Since, then, he has:
- Started a podcast, Lives Well Lived, along with his frequent collaborator Kasia [...]
Outline:
(00:37) What Singer has been up to recently
(01:31) EA-relevant moments in Singer's career
First published:
July 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kPaGNzBYe7iti8fop/peter-singer-ama-july-30th
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Last week I attended the UFAW International Animal Welfare Conference 2024 in Porto. Here are some facts about the conference and its content as well as some personal impressions. I hope this gives some insights into animal welfare work outside of EA. Of course, this is just one conference, though.
I am not affiliated with UFAW and did not present any work at the conference.
TLDR
- The UFAW International Animal Welfare Conference 2024 was an academic two-day event with talks and posters
- most content was on farmed animals and lab animals
- there was some representation of wild animals, especially among the talks, including the keynote
- companion animals, working animals and animals in zoos/sanctuaries/rehabilitation centres together also made up a large part of the programme, mostly in the form of posters
- my personal impressions include
- most people attending were not vegetarian or vegan
- general enthusiasm about helping [...]
Outline:
(00:34) TLDR
(01:25) about UFAW and the conference
(02:02) representation of different animal groups in the conference content
(02:08) overview
(02:51) wild animals
(04:23) farmed animals
(04:53) lab animals
(05:15) companion/working animals and animals in zoos
(05:45) visible EA-related presence
(06:10) personal experience of the vibe
(06:15) food
(07:15) general enthusiasm
(07:55) attitudes towards wild animal welfare
(08:58) potentially interesting future work
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zXg5xj2b2GLmdAa5m/animal-welfare-outside-of-ea-numbers-and-thoughts-on-ufaw
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Attendees at our recent PauseAI Unconference TL;DR: 🥳
Last November we had only 4 months of runway remaining–today we have ~1.5 years.
I’m reminded of the saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, and I would be writing a very different update if not for the village that came together to support us since our fundraising appeal last winter.
We received several months of runway as a result of individual donations from alumni and supporters, which gave us the time to approach new funders, as well as encouragement to persevere.
Others volunteered their time and energy to support us. Guests at the hotel helped with day-to-day tasks so that we could focus on fundraising, and we received priceless advice from more experienced EAs on how to improve our offering and make the value of our project more apparent to funders.
As a result of all the [...]
Outline:
(01:59) The Future of CEEALAR!
(02:03) AI Winter is Coming to CEEALAR
(02:49) Workshops and Bootcamps and Hackathons, Oh My!
(03:23) Renovations
(03:54) Upcoming Opportunities
(04:14) Apply to stay at CEEALAR
(05:50) Volunteer
(06:45) Our Commitments
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/esFoMmj3PAECTqSrF/ceealar-2024-update
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Executive Summary
- We should take uncertainty seriously. Rethink Priorities’ Moral Parliament Tool, for instance, highlights that whether a worldview favors a particular project depends on relatively small differences in empirical assumptions and the way we characterize the commitments of that worldview.
- We have good reason to be uncertain:
- The relevant empirical and philosophical issues are difficult.
- We’re largely guessing when it comes to most of the key empirical claims associated with Global Catastrophic Risks and Animal Welfare.
- As a community, EA has some objectionable epistemic features—e.g., it can be an echo chamber—that should probably make us less confident of the claims that are popular within it.
- The extent of our uncertainty is a reason to build models more like the Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament Tools and less like traditional BOTECs. This is because:
- Our models allow you to change parameters systematically to see how [...]
Outline:
(00:16) Executive Summary
(01:52) Introduction
(03:04) Recapping CRAFT
(06:28) How confident should we be in any particular combination of empirical, normative, and metanormative judgments?
(07:50) The relevant empirical and philosophical issues are difficult
(10:09) We’re largely guessing when it comes to most of the key empirical claims associated with GCR and animal work
(11:18) As a community, EA has some objectionable epistemic features
(12:42) There are better and worse ways of dealing with uncertainty
(15:17) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MpbtXpjXKNsrfoZCm/taking-uncertainty-seriously-or-why-tools-matter
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Highlights
- Destabilization could be the biggest setback for great power conflict, AI, bio-risk, and climate disruption.
- Polarization plays a role in nearly every causal pathway leading to destabilization of the United States, and there is no indication polarization will decrease.
- The United States fits the pattern of past democracies that have descended into authoritarian regimes in many key aspects.
- The most recent empirical research on civil conflicts suggests the United States is in a category that has a 4% annual risk of falling into a civil conflict.
- In 2022 (when this was originally written), Mike Berkowitz, ED of Democracy Funders Network and 80,000 Hours guest, believes there is 50% chance American democracy fails in the next 6 years.
- For every dollar spent on depolarization efforts, there are probably at least a hundred dollars spent aggravating the culture war.
- Destabilization of the United States could wipe out billions of dollars of pledged EA funds.
Note following the [...]
Outline:
(00:07) Highlights
(01:16) Note following the assassination attempt of former President Trump
(02:45) Preface
(06:10) Acknowledgements
(06:24) Summary
(09:08) Possibility
(10:02) Big picture
(10:06) Authoritarianism
(12:57) Civil conflict
(16:50) Polarization
(20:40) How close we already came (January 6th)
(26:42) A note on the military counter argument
(28:18) Top reasons why the United States wouldn’t destabilize
(29:14) What I would have included in a longer version
(29:51) Conclusion
(31:36) Importance
(31:59) Global ramifications and great power conflict
(33:17) Artificial Intelligence and bio-risk
(33:22) Applicable to both
(34:27) Artificial Intelligence
(34:48) Accelerating climate disruption
(34:52) Authoritarianism
(35:25) Civil conflict
(36:08) Significance
(37:02) Effects on the Effective Altruism movement
(37:06) Talent
(37:29) Funds
(38:15) Plausible scenario
(39:01) Neglectedness
(40:36) Through the lens of polarization
(42:03) Tractability
(44:15) What is needed
(44:18) The broad needs
(44:46) Structural-reform needs[80]
(46:03) Needs for stopping polarizing forces
(46:38) Needs for Depolarizing the population
(46:58) Why it's difficult
(47:02) Structural reform
(47:36) Stopping polarizing forces
(49:01) Depolarize the population
(50:36) Where there is traction
(50:40) Ballot initiatives
(51:29) Robust federalism
(51:48) Prescription (what OP/EA could do)
(53:04) Funding and scaling existing efforts
(53:09) Create an operation focused on recruiting more funders and key non-funder partners to this effort
(54:00) Fund ballot initiative efforts and organizations
(56:15) Fund existing depolarization efforts and organizations
(56:51) Fund new organizations to fill gaps through an approach similar to the arrangement between CE and FTX for biosecurity
(57:54) Fund experiments/projects that will give us actionable information
(58:30) Miscellaneous interventions
(58:34) Preempting accelerationist events
(01:00:19) Invest in local journalism
(01:00:51) Promote sincere populist leadership in the Republican apparatus to replace culture warriors
(01:03:49) Invest in mutual aid networks
(01:04:17) Strengthening unions and preparing for a general strike
(01:05:32) My personal favorite
(01:05:36) Left-Right coalitions to run a slate of ballot-initiatives for structural reform
(01:06:49) Uncertainties (why OP/EA should do a medium-level investigation)
(01:08:21) Conclusion/call to action
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First published:
July 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kmx3rKh2K4ANwMqpW/destabilization-of-the-united-states-the-top-x-factor-ea
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Summary/Introduction
Aschenbrenner's ‘Situational Awareness’ (Aschenbrenner, 2024) promotes a dangerous narrative of national securitisation. This narrative is not, despite what Aschenbrenner suggests, descriptive, but rather, it is performative, constructing a particular notion of security that makes the dangerous world Aschenbrenner describes more likely to happen.
This piece draws on the work of Nathan A. Sears (2023), who argues that the failure to sufficiently eliminate plausible existential threats throughout the 20th century emerges from a ‘national securitisation’ narrative winning out over a ‘humanity macrosecuritization narrative’. National securitisation privileges extraordinary measures to defend the nation, often centred around military force and logics of deterrence/balance of power and defence. Humanity macrosecuritization suggests the object of security is to defend all of humanity, not just the nation, and often invokes logics of collaboration, mutual restraint and constraints on sovereignty. Sears uses a number of examples to show that when issues are constructed as issues [...]
Outline:
(00:08) Summary/Introduction
(03:03) Section 1- What is securitisation
(07:39) Section 2: Sears 2023 - The macrosecuritization of Existential Threats to humanity
(16:25) Section 3 - How does this relate to Aschenbrenner's ‘Situational Awareness’?
(19:49) Section 4 - Why Aschenbrenners narrative is dangerous and the role of expert communities
(29:35) Section 5- The possibility of a moratorium, military conflict and collaboration
(36:51) Conclusion
First published:
July 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H6xEhur9Lbbv9dhBC/against-aschenbrenner-how-situational-awareness-constructs-a
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I'm often asked about how the existential risk landscape has changed in the years since I wrote The Precipice. Earlier this year, I gave a talk on exactly that, and I want to share it here.
Here's a video of the talk and a full transcript.
In the years since I wrote The Precipice, the question I’m asked most is how the risks have changed. It's now almost four years since the book came out, but the text has to be locked down a long time earlier, so we are really coming up on about five years of changes to the risk landscape.
I’m going to dive into four of the biggest risks — climate change, nuclear, pandemics, and AI — to show how they’ve changed. Now a lot has happened over those years, and I don’t want this to just be recapping the news in fast-forward. But [...]
Outline:
(01:30) Climate Change
(01:58) Carbon Emissions
(03:18) Climate Sensitivity
(06:36) Nuclear
(06:39) Heightened Chance of Onset
(08:09) Likely New Arms Race
(09:48) Funding Collapse
(10:47) Pandemics
(10:50) Covid
(15:57) Protective technologies
(18:53) AI in Biotech
(20:27) AI
(20:45) RL agents ⇒ language models
(24:53) Racing
(26:59) Governance
(30:09) Conclusions
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First published:
July 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iKLLSYHvnhgcpoBxH/the-precipice-revisited
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This is a link post. Introduction:
The (highly interrelated) effective altruist and Rationalist communities are very small on a global scale. Therefore, in general, most intelligence, skill and expertise is outside of the community, not within it.
I don’t think many people will disagree with this statement. But sometimes it's worth reminding people of the obvious, and also it is worth quantifying and visualizing the obvious, to get a proper feel for the scale of the difference. I think some people are acting like they have absorbed this point, and some people definitely are not.
In this post, I will try and estimate the size of these communities. I will compare how many smart people are in the community vs outside the community. I will do the same for people in a few professions, and then I will go into controversial mode and try and give some advice that I [...]
The original text contained 7 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Bz4McBt62p63Zkjzb/most-smart-and-skilled-people-are-outside-of-the-ea
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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There seems to be a widely-held view in popular culture that no physicist really understands quantum mechanics. The meme probably gained popularity after Richard Feynman famously stated in a lecture (transcribed in the book “The Character of Physical Law”) “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics”, though many prominent physicists have expressed a similar sentiment. Anyone aware of the overwhelming success of quantum mechanics will recognize that the seeming lack of understanding of the theory is primarily about how to interpret its ontology, and not about how to do the calculations or run the experiments, which clearly many physicists understand extremely well. But even the ontological confusion is debatable. With the proliferation of interpretations of quantum mechanics—each varying in terms of, among others, which classical intuitions should be abandoned—at least some physicists seem to think that there isn’t anything weird or mysterious about the quantum [...]
Outline:
(06:06) Not all computers are computers
(09:21) The problem of single-cell organisms
(10:32) Using “functionally equivalent” silicon neurons
(14:29) The binding problem
(20:35) Most things are fuzzy, but not all things are fuzzy
(26:13) A note on emergence
(28:23) Parting thoughts
The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6cc9y3rwSBRWsquBs/abandoning-functionalism-some-intuition-pumps
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Images from the article:
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This is a link post. Introduction:
The (highly interrelated) effective altruist and Rationalist communities are very small on a global scale. Therefore, in general, most intelligence, skill and expertise is outside of the community, not within it.
I don’t think many people will disagree with this statement. But sometimes it's worth reminding people of the obvious, and also it is worth quantifying and visualizing the obvious, to get a proper feel for the scale of the difference. I think some people are acting like they have absorbed this point, and some people definitely are not.
In this post, I will try and estimate the size of these communities. I will compare how many smart people are in the community vs outside the community. I will do the same for people in a few professions, and then I will go into controversial mode and try and give some advice that I [...]
The original text contained 7 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Bz4McBt62p63Zkjzb/most-smart-and-skilled-people-are-outside-of-the-ea
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Introduction
This post is a write-up of a panel discussion held at EA Global: Boston 2023 (27–29 October). The panel was moderated by Matthew Gentzel. Matthew currently co-leads Longview Philanthropy's program on nuclear weapons policy and co-manages the organization's Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund.
He was joined by two other experts on US-China relations and related catastrophic risks:
- Tong Zhao, Senior Fellow for the Nuclear Policy Program and Carnegie China, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Bill Drexel, Fellow for the Technology and National Security Program, Center for a New American Security
Below is a transcript of the discussion, which we’ve lightly edited for clarity. The panelists covered the following main topics:
- Opening remarks summarizing the panelists’ general views on the US-China relationship and related risks, with an initial focus on nuclear security before exploring other risks and dangerous technologies
- How to address different norms around sharing information
- Problems resulting from risk compensation
- [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Introduction
(01:35) Opening remarks
(20:55) How to address different norms around sharing information
(24:36) Problems resulting from risk compensation
(27:24) Overhyped and underhyped risks
(30:25) AI governance structures, the Chinese defense minister's dismissal, and the US's semiconductor export policies
(34:45) Ideas for calibrating how the US cooperates and/or competes with China
First published:
July 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S7KkN6jzvEiCNofm9/the-us-china-relationship-and-catastrophic-risk-eag-boston
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(PDF available)
I show how a standard argument for advancing progress is extremely sensitive to how humanity's story eventually ends. Whether advancing progress is ultimately good or bad depends crucially on whether it also advances the end of humanity. Because we know so little about the answer to this crucial question, the case for advancing progress is undermined. I suggest we must either overcome this objection through improving our understanding of these connections between progress and human extinction or switch our focus to advancing certain kinds of progress relative to others — changing where we are going, rather than just how soon we get there.[1]
Things are getting better. While there are substantial ups and downs, long-term progress in science, technology, and values have tended to make people's lives longer, freer, and more prosperous. We could represent this as a graph of quality of life over time, giving [...]
The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XKeQbizpDP45CYcYc/on-the-value-of-advancing-progress
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Summary
This post reports on data about the personality psychology of EAs from the 2018 EA Survey.
- We observe some differences between our EA sample and the general population:
- Younger male EAs and older female EAs score higher on conscientiousness compared to the general population.
- Male EAs score lower on neuroticism than the general public.
- EAs score high on need for cognition, and relatively higher than a US and UK general population sample.
- Though this may be partially due to demographic differences between the samples.
- EAs appear to be slightly lower in empathic concern than a sample of US undergraduates.
- But this seems attributable to demographic differences between the samples, in particular gender.
- Small differences were observed regarding maximization and alternative search compared to other samples.
- Generally, the lack of population norms of various personality traits makes comparisons between samples difficult.
- Overall, we found only small associations between [...]
Outline:
(00:07) Summary
(01:59) Introduction
(02:57) Big Five
(06:26) Need for Cognition
(08:33) Interpersonal Reactivity Index
(11:20) Maximization
(14:03) Personality traits and donations
(15:55) Personality traits and cause prioritization
(17:22) Appendix
(17:25) Big Five item distributions
(17:59) Alternative IRI comparison
(18:54) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 14 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RtaJ2nKDihxn2wm9J/ea-survey-personality-traits-in-the-ea-community
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Key Links:
- Link to the tool
- Link to post introducing the tool
- 2-min Intro Video
- 5-min Basics Video
Introduction
Here, we show how the Portfolio Builder can be used to explore several scenarios and controversies of interest to the EA community. We are far from certain that the parameter values we have chosen below are accurate; we have not rigorously vetted them. Instead, we have used intuitive parameter values for illustrative purposes. Our goal here is to show users how they can put the Portfolio Tool to work, not to settle first-order questions.
Portfolio allocations across cause areas are strongly influenced by one's views about the potential scale of successes in those areas and the probability of those successes. For example, if you assign little or no value to the lives of animals, you will think that even “successful” projects in that area achieve very little. The expected [...]
Outline:
(00:24) Introduction
(02:10) Focusing on the next few generations
(08:00) High vs. low weights for animals
(10:12) Diminishing marginal returns
(13:17) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 7 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 10th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pu9WFaK9ZjBZmW7dc/exploring-key-cases-with-the-portfolio-builder
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Link to the tool:
https://portfolio.rethinkpriorities.org
2-min Introductory Video:
5-min Tool Features Walkthrough Video:
Executive Summary
- This post introduces Rethink Priorities’ Portfolio Builder Tool. This interactive tool is designed to help individuals and organizations optimize their philanthropic giving portfolios by evaluating the cost-effectiveness of different cause areas. It leverages empirical estimates, simplified cost curves, and tailored decision-theoretic assumptions to help users explore optimal portfolio compositions.
- The Portfolio Builder Tool has two primary functions: (1) finding the optimal portfolio based on user-defined parameters, and (2) assessing the value of a specified portfolio under different decision procedures.
- The tool integrates cost-effectiveness analysis with decision-making models like Expected Value (EV), Difference-Making Risk Averse Expected Utility (DMREU), Weighted-Linear Utility Theory (WLU), and Tails-Excluded EV, enabling philanthropists to explore the impact of various combinations of empirical assumptions and risk attitudes.
- If the user is uncertain about decision procedures, the tool offers a [...]
Outline:
(00:25) Executive Summary
(02:33) Intro
(06:53) Key Components
(07:05) A. Cost-Effectiveness Curves
(08:53) B. Probability Distributions
(13:38) C. Decision Theories
(16:19) Outputs
(16:23) Optimal Proposed Portfolio
(17:07) Alternative Decision Theory Scores
(18:34) Aggregating Across Decision-Theories
(19:06) Example of a pattern we noticed
(19:28) Existential Risk Mitigation fares well under EV maximization
(21:14) Risk aversion favors Global Health and Animal Welfare
(21:58) Empirical uncertainty about cost-effectiveness matters
(22:28) Two strategies for improving individual funding decisions
(23:32) Getting Started
(24:04) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 6 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 10th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ah3QKqYjJAeZ7MbHA/rethink-priorities-portfolio-builder-tool
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From Darren Margolias: I'm the Executive Director of Beast Philanthropy, the charity founded by the world's most popular YouTuber MrBeast.
We recently collaborated with GiveDirectly on the video below. You can read background the project from our LinkedIn here and here (plus GiveDirectly's blog)
On Thursday, July 18th I'll be recording a video AMA with CEA's Emma Richter. Her questions will come from you, and we'll post the video and transcript here afterwards.
Please post your questions as comments to this post and upvote the questions you’d like me to answer most. Emma and I will do our best to get to as many as we can.
Feel free to ask anything you'd like to know about Beast Philanthropy's process, projects, and goals!
First published:
July 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7QfKaF2bnCbuREJNx/ama-beast-philanthropy-s-darren-margolias
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Cross-posted from my NAONotebook. Thanks to Evan Fields and Mike McLaren for editorialfeedback on this post.
In DetectingGenetically Engineered Viruses With Metagenomic Sequencing we have:
our best guess is that if this system were deployed at the scale ofapproximately $1.5M/y it could detect something genetically engineeredthat shed like SARS-CoV-2 before 0.2% of people in the monitoredsewersheds had been infected. I want to focus on the last bit: "in the monitored sewersheds". The ideais, if a system like this is tracking wastewater from New York City, itsability to raise an alert for a new pandemic will depend on how far alongthat pandemic is in that particular city. This is closely related toanother question: what fraction of the global population would have to beinfected before it could raise an alert?
There are two [...]
First published:
July 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NHZ3HWz5tkzsoBq9Y/sample-prevalance-vs-global-prevalence
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Open to Debate (a US radio program "heard by millions and distributed on more than 300 NPR stations across the country") is hosting a debate between Peter Singer and Alice Crary on the question: Does the Effective Altruism Movement Get Giving Right?
The debate will be on Wednesday July 10th, at 7pm ET, held virtually, and lasting around 65 mins.
They've asked me to be one of the "3-4 experts" who ask a question of the debaters towards the end of the debate, and to share the below invitation to RSVP to watch the debate live. (I assume the recording will be available for public viewing/listening later.)
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5iCy6JThZE6CCgpzh/open-to-debate-singer-crary-ea-debate-july-10
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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TL;DR
The next round of AIM's Grantmaking Program kicks off in September. We’ll be taking a small cohort of funders and grantmakers through a free 9-week course designed to strengthen your grantmaking skills and network. If you are a funder giving over ~$1M annually and want to increase your impact, get in touch by August 1st to join us.
About the program
Boiled down to 3 things, we focus on:
- Strategic thinking: identifying your values and goals; developing an evidence-based approach; and mitigating common biases and logical errors in grantmaking
- Methodical impact: using tools like cost-effectiveness analyses and weighted factor models to define impact and pursue positive outcomes, irrespective of who benefits from them
- Engaged community: connecting committed funders so they can learn from each other, better coordinate funding, and network with subject matter experts
Program structure
- Duration: 9 weeks (September 23rd to November 22nd)
- Format [...]
First published:
July 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9zNRMmppjpqodtkGo/join-the-next-round-of-aim-s-grantmaking-program
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This post introduces Rethink Priorities’ Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools Sequence (the CRAFT Sequence). After a brief statement of the problems that CRAFT aims to address, we provide an overview of what it includes.
Building Giving Portfolios
Some people think that you should go all-in on particular giving opportunities. Some people think that you should diversify your giving portfolio. What assumptions and circumstances favor going all-in? What assumptions and circumstances favor diversification? And either way, what should your resources support?
Rethink Priorities’ recent Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model (CCM) can help us rank interventions within certain cause areas. It can also help us rank options based on a handful of key decision theories. However, the CCM isn’t designed to produce giving portfolios per se. The CCM can help us compare interventions with respect to their expected value or risk-adjusted value. But it was never intended to answer the question [...]
Outline:
(00:27) Building Giving Portfolios
(02:42) What's to Come
(04:11) The Value to You
(06:58) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2ZhcAjRofgNFcswZY/an-introduction-to-the-craft-sequence
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Author's Note: Written in a slightly combative tone [1]as I have found the arguments for the proposition this week to be insufficiently compelling for the debate statement at hand. Also, I'm very rushed getting this out in time so I with more time I would probably have focused more on the ideas and had more time to add nuance and caveats. I apologise in advance for my shortcomings, and hope you can take the good parts of it and overlook the bad.
Parsing the Debate statement correctly means that supporting it entails supporting radical changes to EA
The statement for AI Welfare Debate Week (hereafter AWDW) is “AI welfare should be an EA priority”. However, expanding this with the clarifications provided by the Forum team leads to the expanded statement: "5%+ of unrestricted EA talent and funding should be focused on the potential well-being of future artificial intelligence systems". [...]
Outline:
(00:33) Parsing the Debate statement correctly means that supporting it entails supporting radical changes to EA
(02:40) These changes can only be justified if the case to do so is strongly justified
(03:54) Most posts on AI Welfare Debate Week have failed to make this case
(04:00) The burden of proof for prioritising AI Welfare requires stronger arguments
(05:13) The justifications that are provided seem rather weak
(08:42) Working on AI Welfare can still be valuable and interesting
(09:40) Conclusion: A Win by Default?
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rdaRk9yXCLartHCdr/making-ai-welfare-an-ea-priority-requires-justifications
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Last week, I started a full-time position at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, and I’ve been reflecting a bit on how convoluted and indirect my path here was. I thought that journey might be worth sharing.
In the genre of "Well, how did I get here?," I appreciate Johannes Haushofer's CV of failures for helping compensate for selection bias in career stories. If we only see the things that go right and the outcomes that emerge from them, we'll have a very truncated sense of what actually leads to what. So here's my story.
Stage 1 (2006-2010): Aiming to be a political science professor
I went to a small US college whose graduates are overrepresented in EA and in PhD programs. Most of my friends ended up getting PhDs and were pretty serious academically. I liked them, and I liked my professors, so I opted to board the [...]
Outline:
(00:38) Stage 1 (2006-2010): Aiming to be a political science professor
(01:20) Stage 2 (2010-2013): Trying other paths for a few years
(02:13) Stage 3 (2013-2015): Grad school is not a good fit
(03:33) Stage 4 (2016-2017) Transitioning to tech
(04:57) Stage 5 (2017-2021): The tech years
(05:56) Stage 6: (2021): The Appalachian Trail
(06:05) Stage 7 (2021-2024): freelancing, one final hurrah in tech, and freelancing again
(07:54) I obviously never had a plan to get here
The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ekbCzxh2SfA64GrxD/my-circuitous-undirected-path-to-an-ea-job
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. Early last month, Leopold Aschenbrenner released a long essay and podcast outlining his projections for the future of AI. Both of these sources are full of interesting arguments and evidence, for a comprehensive summary see Zvi's post here. Rather than going point by point I will instead accept the major premises of Leopold's essay but contest some of his conclusions.
So what are the major premises of his piece?
- There will be several orders of magnitude increase in investment into AI. 100x more spending, 100x more compute, 100x more efficient algorithms, and an order of magnitude or two gains from some form of “learning by doing” or “unhobbling” on top.
- This investment scale up will be sufficient to achieve AGI. This means the models on the other side of the predicted compute scale up will be able to automate all cognitive jobs with vast [...]
First published:
July 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/t9zBskfsFWBhRsdTQ/an-ai-manhattan-project-is-not-inevitable
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This is a link post. tl;dr: We shouldn't expect normative perfection of people in general, or pretend to it ourselves. It's OK to be suboptimal: willingness to recognize the state is the first step to (sometimes) doing even better. (But still, be OK with the fact that you'll never be perfect.)
[Probably old news for most of this audience, but it's sometimes helpful to reiterate this sort of thing.]
Intro
A curious feature of human nature is that we’re very psychologically invested in seeing ourselves as good. Teaching applied ethics, it's striking how resistant students often are to any hint of moral self-critique. Meat-eaters will come up with the most transparently absurd rationalizations for disregarding all the torture that goes into producing their favorite meals. Some philosophers deny that having kids is good, simply because they’re scared of the (non-)implication that people ought to have more kids.[1] And there's obviously [...]
Outline:
(00:33) Intro
(01:20) The role of social norms
(03:51) Philosophical Cover
(07:14) Living with Imperfection
(09:23) Avoiding Villainy
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/93tiQue2nCSRhaLL4/imperfection-is-ok
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Since Alvea wound down, AI moral patienthood/welfare/wellbeing[1] has been my primary professional/impact focus. I started exploring this topic casually last fall, then spent the winter investigating potential grantmaking opportunities and related strategy questions. Now, I’m working with Rob Long on a combination of research projects and engagement with leading AI labs on AI moral patienthood and related issues. I’m approaching this topic as one component of the broader puzzle of making a future with transformative AI go well, rather than as an independent/standalone issue.
My overall focus is on building a clearer picture of relevant questions and issues, developing tools and recommendations for how labs and other stakeholders might navigate them, and improving the discourse and decision-making around this topic. I’m not focused on general advocacy for digital minds—there are significant potential risks associated with both under- and over-attributing moral status to AI systems, which makes it important [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bvcbdnsJ9rEvmcZXn/why-i-m-working-on-ai-welfare
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As of today, Peter Kyle is the UK's new Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, which means he's the elected official responsible for UK AISI. Here are some brief notes I found on Peter Kyle's stance on AI (all from his Wikipedia page).
- Peter Kyle was appointed as Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology in September 2023.
- In October 2023, Kyle said that a future Labour government would reduce regulations on technology companies in the development and use of AI and "put it to work for everyone from every background."
- In November 2023, Kyle outlined Labour policies to impose stricter regulations on general AI research companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic with stronger requirements for reporting, data-sharing, and user safety. Kyle has also proposed the creation of a 'Regulatory Innovation office', which would expedite important regulatory decisions.
- In February 2024, Kyle announced that Labour would scrap the existing voluntary testing [...]
First published:
July 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W995yHwMJvCFuhAkv/notes-on-new-uk-aisi-minister
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This is a link post. Winfried Stöcker is a German doctor. After a career developing immunization technologies, he sells Euroinmun to to Perkin Elmer, a US megacorp, for $1.3B; his own majority stake would be worth $600M, so after taxes a German magazine estimated his net worth at circa $300M. After selling the company, he makes a variety of investments, like buying a nearby airport, and continues working on his own, smaller lab, Labor Stöcker. He also donates to the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), a German far right party, and positions himself as being against more immigration.
Come COVID, the guy realizes that he has the relevant expertise, and in March 2020 develops a vaccine in his personal lab. He tests this vaccine on himself, and later on family and employees.
After some experiments, he becomes sure of the vaccine's efficacy and harmlessness, as it uses the same [...]
First published:
July 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QdLwsESrfD5q6BTsk/case-study-the-luebeck-vaccine
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Apply to ML4Good's Summer Bootcamps!
ML4Good bootcamps are 10-day bootcamps focusing on upskilling in technical AI safety, exploring governance, and delving into conceptual topics. ML4Good is a non-profit project and free of charge for the participants. We're seeking motivated individuals with some coding experience who want to make a difference in the field of AI Safety.
💻 Activities:
- Peer-coding sessions following a technical curriculum with mentors
- Presentations by experts in the field
- Review and discussion of AI Safety literature
- Personal career advice and mentorship
📅 Dates:
Applications are now open for our UK and Germany bootcamps.
🇬🇧 UK Bootcamp
Apply to the 🇬🇧 UK Bootcamp now* August 31st to September 10th, 2024 * Application deadline: July 7th, 2024
🇩🇪 Germany Bootcamp
Apply to the 🇩🇪 Germany Bootcamp now* September 23rd to October 3rd, 2024 * Application deadline: July 14th, 2024
More [...]
Outline:
(00:04) Apply to ML4Good's Summer Bootcamps!
(00:31) 💻 Activities:
(00:52) 📅 Dates:
(01:00) 🇬🇧 UK Bootcamp
(01:20) 🇩🇪 Germany Bootcamp
First published:
July 4th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HRE8ZagdeyCw5pixe/ml4good-summer-bootcamps-applications-open
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One of the core questions regarding the moral status of AI concerns their consciousness. Is there anything it's like to be them? Contemporary AI systems are widely regarded as clearly not conscious, but there seems to be growing concern among experts that we may see conscious AI systems in the not-too-distant future.
Understanding our duties to the AI systems we create will involve assessing the nature of their minds, and thus their moral status. There are many important questions about AI minds that bear on their moral status, but whether they are consciousness has a clear and widely recognized role. In addition, it may be important in securing or denying AIs the public's moral consideration.
Existing consciousness research revolves first and foremost around human beings. The physical bases (or neural correlates) of consciousness in humans remain uncertain. Leading proposals are both vague and highly controversial. Extending theories of consciousness [...]
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yLzHyDvfR6skhwLcZ/rethink-priorities-digital-consciousness-project
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Summary: AIM's Mental Health Funding Circle ran its latest round of grants this spring, distributing $367,000 across six grantees.
About the MHFC: Global mental health continues to be highly neglected despite contributing more to cumulative suffering than many more highly-prioritized physical health conditions. A handful of effectiveness-minded funders come together twice a year for an open grants round, looking to find and fund the most impactful mental health projects. If you or someone you know may be interested in joining us, we would warmly welcome new members! If you give (or are interested in giving) at least $50,000 annually to effective global mental health projects, please reach out or apply here to join.
The Grants: As all circle members make their own funding decisions, the justification given for each grant may not represent the thinking behind each funder's actions. That being said, I’m writing some justifications because it's fun [...]
First published:
July 4th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CikS5szJoSxhu2BjR/mhfc-spring-24-grants
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I haven't shared this post with other relevant parties – my experience has been that private discussion of this sort of thing is more paralyzing than helpful. I might change my mind in the resulting discussion, but, I prefer that discussion to be public.
I think 80,000 hours should remove OpenAI from its job board, and similar EA job placement services should do the same.
(I personally believe 80k shouldn't advertise Anthropic jobs either, but I think the case for that is somewhat less clear)
I think OpenAI has demonstrated a level of manipulativeness, recklessness, and failure to prioritize meaningful existential safety work, that makes me think EA orgs should not be going out of their way to give them free resources. (It might make sense for some individuals to work there, but this shouldn't be a thing 80k or other orgs are systematically funneling talent into)
There [...]
Outline:
(04:41) FAQ / Appendix
(04:51) Q: It seems that, like it or not, OpenAI is a place transformative AI research is likely to happen, and having good people work there is important.
(05:02) Isnt it better to have alignment researchers working there, than not? Are you sure youre not running afoul of misguided purity instincts?
(07:06) Q: What about jobs like security research engineer?.
(07:12) That seems straightforwardly good for OpenAI to have competent people for, and probably doesnt require a good Safety Culture to pay off?
(08:09) Q: What about offering a path towards good standing? to OpenAI?
(10:44) Q: What if we left up job postings, but with an explicit disclaimer linking to a post saying why people should be skeptical?
First published:
July 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DjCXPkGDisS6oj6Ga/80-000-hours-should-remove-openai-from-the-job-board-and
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Context
Longtermists point out that the scale of our potential for impact is far greater if we are able to influence the course of a long future, as we could change the circumstances of a tremendous number of lives.
One potential avenue for long-term influence involves spreading values that persist and shape the futures that our descendants choose to build. There is some reason to expect that future moral values will be stable. Many groups have preferences about the world beyond their backyard. They should work to ensure that their values are shared by those who can help bring them about. Changes in the values that future groups support will lead to changes in the protections for the things we care about. If our values concern how our descendants will act, then we should aim to create institutions that promote those values. If we are successful in promoting those [...]
Outline:
(00:04) Context
(01:39) Controversy
(08:45) Scale
(12:33) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C652FAbbnSrJWumhH/the-value-of-consciousness-as-a-pivotal-question
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary:
- Digital sentience might be on the horizon, bringing with it an inevitable debate and significant risks.
- Philosophers research whether AIs can be sentient and should deserve protection. Yet, ultimately, what matters most is what key decision-makers and the general public will think.
- People will disagree on whether AIs are sentient and what types of rights they deserve (e.g., harm protection, autonomy, voting rights).
- Some might form strong emotional bonds with human-like AIs, driving a push to grant them rights, while others will view this as too costly or risky.
- Given the high stakes and wide scope of disagreement, national and even global conflicts are a possibility.
- We must navigate a delicate balance: not granting AIs sufficient rights could lead to immense digital suffering, while granting them rights too hastily could lead to human disempowerment.
The arrival of (potentially) sentient AIs
We could soon have sentient AI systems [...]
Outline:
(01:08) The arrival of (potentially) sentient AIs
(01:49) Multiple failure modes
(04:30) A period of confusion and disagreement
(08:06) How do people view AI sentience today?
(10:41) Two sides
(10:50) Resistance to AI rights
(12:46) Support for AI rights
(14:08) How emotional bonds with AI will shape society
(16:15) What psychologies will AI companions have?
(19:34) Disagreement about hidden AI suffering
(21:23) Disagreement between AI safety and AI welfare advocates
(22:08) Will we go to war over AI rights?
(22:30) The risk of conflict in the US
(23:48) Comparisons to other rights movements
(27:08) The risk of global conflict
(28:32) Conflict isn’t inevitable
(30:43) What can we do to prepare?
(31:14) Pause the development of sentient AI
(35:35) Foster a nuanced discussion
(38:15) Avenues for research
(41:19) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PbXTFT22fCXHorhz3/will-disagreement-about-ai-rights-lead-to-societal-conflict
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by Andreas Mogensen, Bradford Saad, and Patrick Butlin
1. Introduction
This post summarizes why we think that digital minds might be very important for how well the future goes, as well as some of the key research topics we think it might be especially valuable to work on as a result.
We begin by summarizing the case for thinking that digital minds could be important. This is largely a synthesis of points that have already been raised elsewhere, so readers who are already familiar with the topic might want to skip ahead to section 3, where we outline what we see as some of the highest-priority open research questions.
2. Importance
Let's define a digital mind as a conscious individual whose psychological states are due to the activity of an inorganic computational substrate as opposed to a squishy brain made up of neurons, glia, and the like.[1] By [...]
Outline:
(00:12) 1. Introduction
(00:46) 2. Importance
(09:57) 3. How research might help
(10:34) Assessing AI systems for consciousness
(12:36) Indicators of of valenced experience
(14:18) Biological constraints
(16:13) Norms and principles governing the creation of digital minds
(17:28) Mind and moral status
(19:55) Willing servitude
(20:48) 4. Concluding Observations
(22:57) Bibliography:
The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HZtBJi4fv5ftEAj9p/digital-minds-importance-and-key-research-questions
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This is a link post. Since our early days, we’ve studied the history of philanthropy to understand what great giving looks like. The lessons we learned made us more ambitious and broadened our view of philanthropy's potential.
The rooms in our San Francisco office pay tribute to this legacy. Seven of them are named after philanthropic “wins” — remarkable feats made possible by philanthropic funders. In this post, we’ll share the story behind each win.
Green Revolution
During the second half of the twentieth century, the Green Revolution dramatically increased agricultural production in developing countries like Mexico and India. At a time of rapid population growth, this boost in production reduced hunger, helped to avert famine, and stimulated national economies.
The Rockefeller Foundation played a key role by supporting early research by Norman Borlaug and others to enhance agricultural productivity. Applications of this research — developed in collaboration with [...]
Outline:
(00:48) Green Revolution
(01:35) The Pill
(02:22) Sesame Street
(02:59) Nunn-Lugar
(03:49) Marriage Equality
(04:37) Deworming
(05:51) Cage-Free Eggs
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
First published:
July 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mHs3RcbpTwJRS8xif/seven-philanthropic-wins-the-stories-that-inspired-open-phil
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For AI Welfare Debate Week, I thought I'd write up this post that's been juggling around in my head for a while. My thesis is simple: while LLMs may well be conscious (I'd have no way of knowing), there's nothing actionable we can do to further their welfare.
Many people I respect seem to take the "anti-anti-LLM-welfare" position: they don't directly argue that LLMs can suffer, but they get conspicuously annoyed when other people say that LLMs clearly cannot suffer. This post is addressed to such people; I am arguing that LLMs cannot be moral patients in any useful sense and we can confidently ignore their welfare when making decisions.
Janus's simulators
You may have seen the LessWrong post by Janus about simulators. This was posted nearly two years ago, and I have yet to see anyone disagree with it. Janus calls LLMs "simulators": unlike hypothetical "oracle AIs" or [...]
Outline:
(00:46) Januss simulators
(03:00) The role-player who never breaks character
(04:37) Hypothetical future AIs
First published:
July 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dkHxf4YHGhB562pbk/llms-cannot-usefully-be-moral-patients
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May 2024 marked the last month of the Center for Effective Aid Policy. This post serves as the public post-mortem. I have strived for it to be interesting to the average forum reader, who may not know much about the cause area.
For professionals in development, we have a few internal private write ups which we may be more interesting, such as an overview of development asks we tried[1], their strengths and weaknesses, and our experience advocating for them.
Our mission
Our mission was to improve the cost-effectiveness of development assistance through policy advocacy. Governments spend billions on projects to help the world's poorest, few of them cost-effective.
For example, one could propose the use of cash-benchmarking to the ministry or push through a political motion to increase the proportion of spending going to the Least Developed Countries.
If one could make even a small part of this very [...]
Outline:
(00:34) Our mission
(01:14) How far did we get?
(01:18) The first months
(02:13) Things pick up
(03:33) The decision to shut down
(04:47) Why changing aid is difficult
(04:51) Development is a competitive market
(06:17) Political champions are few and far between
(07:43) Decreasing budgets limit maneuverability
(08:38) Was our execution sufficient?
(09:47) Insufficient founder-fit
(09:51) We lacked development experience
(10:49) We came to struggle with morale
(12:19) Should others try this intervention?
(15:36) Thank you to everyone who helped
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/emBSDADvCnSwtL2kS/center-for-effective-aid-policy-has-shut-down
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Summary
After over 2 years of operations, High Impact Engineers (HI-Eng) is reverting to a volunteer-led organisational model due to a middling impact outcome and a lack of funding. We wanted to thank all our subscribers, supporters, and contributors for being the driving force behind HI-Eng's achievements, which you can read about in our Impact Report.
What is High Impact Engineers?
High Impact Engineers (HI-Eng for short, pronounced high-enj) is an organisation dedicated to helping (physical - i.e. non-software) engineers increase their ability to have an outsized positive impact through their work.
Selfie from the Physical Engineers meetup at EAG London 2024! Why Is HI-Eng Winding Down?
In December 2023, we sent out a community survey and solicited case studies and testimonials to evaluate our impact, which we wrote up in our Impact Report. As shown in the report, there is some evidence of behavioural and attitudinal changes in our [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Summary
(00:32) What is High Impact Engineers?
(00:58) Why Is HI-Eng Winding Down?
(02:21) Lessons Learnt
(03:46) What Will HI-Eng Look Like Going Forward?
(05:24) Past Achievements
(07:16) History of the Organisation
First published:
July 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kqQgSj3eyBM5D8B2P/high-impact-engineers-is-transitioning-to-a-volunteer-led
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This is a link post. In which I curate and relate great takes from 80k
As artificial intelligence advances, we’ll increasingly urgently face the question of whether and how we ought to take into account the well-being and interests of AI systems themselves. In other words, we’ll face the question of whether AI systems have moral status.[1]
In a recent episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast, polymath researcher and world-model-builder Carl Shulman spoke at length about the moral status of AI systems, now and in the future. Carl has previously written about these issues in Sharing the World with Digital Minds and Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society, both co-authored with Nick Bostrom. This post highlights and comments on ten key ideas from Shulman's discussion with 80,000 Hours host Rob Wiblin.
1. The moral status of AI systems is, and will be, an important issue (and it might not have [...]
Outline:
(00:59) 1. The moral status of AI systems is, and will be, an important issue (and it might not have much do with AI consciousness)
(02:47) 2. While people have doubts about the moral status of AI current systems, they will attribute moral status to AI more and more as AI advances.
(05:41) 3. Many AI systems are likely to say that they have moral status (or might be conflicted about it).
(08:08) 4. People may appeal to theories of consciousness to deny that AI systems have moral status, but these denials will become less and less compelling as AI progresses.
(10:48) 5. Even though these issues are difficult now, we won’t remain persistently confused about AI moral status. AI advances will help us understand these issues better.
(14:17) 6. But we may still struggle some with the indeterminacy of our concepts and values as they are applied to different AI systems.
(15:18) 7. A strong precautionary principle against harming AIs seems like it would ban AI research as we know it.
(16:39) 8. Advocacy about AI welfare seems premature; the best interventions right now involve gaining more understanding.
(17:29) 9. Takeover by misaligned AI could be bad for AI welfare, because AI systems can dominate and mistreat other AI systems.
(19:43) 10. No one has a plan for ensuring the “bare minimum of respect” for AI systems.
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9rvLquXSvdRjnCMvK/carl-shulman-on-the-moral-status-of-current-and-future-ai
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The Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS) has opened applications for a new online fellowship, designed to familiarise more individuals with the core ideas of reducing S-Risks (Risks of Astronomical Suffering).
This program is intended for individuals who:
- Are committed to reducing suffering effectively
- Have an interest in moral philosophy
- Are familiar with the core ideas of Effective Altruism
- Have a degree of understanding of key concepts like cause prioritisation and cause neutrality. (For more information, on cause neutrality you can refer to this essay.)
The fellowship's curriculum will be broader than the Center on Long-Term Risk's existing S-Risk fellowship. We envision that graduates of the new CRS fellowship will be in a better position to potentially proceed onto CLR's fellowship, contribute to s-risk research, and strengthen the s-risk community going forward.
Program Details:
Duration: The fellowship is free of charge and conducted entirely online
Availability: Spots are limited in our initial [...]
First published:
July 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aoZdh9uhbGrYPZwxi/announcing-a-new-s-risk-introductory-fellowship
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Dismantling restrictive gender norms in low-income countries as an EA opportunity by Seema Jayachandran
Introduction
I spoke at EA Global: Boston 2023 about ending restrictive gender norms as an EA opportunity. I discussed my research in India in which we designed and evaluated class discussions about gender equality embedded into the school curriculum. Our randomized control trial (RCT) found that the intervention succeeded in eroding students' support for restrictive norms and the curriculum is now being scaled. Here's the transcript.
Key points include:
- A discussion on economic development vs. gender inequality: despite significant economic growth in India, as indicated by rising GDP per capita and improvements in general well-being, gender inequality measures, particularly the skewed sex ratio, have worsened.
- Overview of the implementation of an RCT in Haryana aimed at shifting gender norms and attitudes through educational interventions targeting school children.
- An evaluation of the efforts to change [...]
First published:
July 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b7WwHXFKs5GarjR64/dismantling-restrictive-gender-norms-in-low-income-countries
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Audio is here if you prefer. Hope you like it.
I got something to offer, all I ask is your time.
And forgiveness for the form: a cheesy rhyme.
You’re skeptical? Makes sense. But I know your type's vice.
You strike me as a purveyor, of do-gooder advice.
And it's pretty damn good, I don't mean to boast,
This advice always fits. Well…sort of. Almost!
Listen good, take your time, to ensure I'm understood,
As I tell you how to do the utmost good.
But first let's all travel, to that fateful day.
When you first got involved, with that thing called EA.
Maybe a colleague, a classmate, or old childhood friend,
Solemnly broke the news, of how this world will end.
Or perhaps it was fanfic, of a boy with a wand,
career tips, free pizza, or a child in a pond.
Well, you found the [...]
First published:
July 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rd8JBxJHC68ErsRLW/do-what-you-can-a-poem
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This is a link post. The Giving What We Can Pledge is now the 🔸10% Pledge! We cover the why (along with our near-term plans and how you can help!) below.
TL;DR:
- The name change will help us grow awareness of the pledge by reducing brand confusion and facilitating partnerships.
- We see it as an important part of reaching our goal of 10,000 pledgers by the end of 2024.
- You can help by adding the orange diamond emoji to your social profiles 🔸 if you’ve taken the 10% Pledge! (or a small blue diamond 🔹 emoji if you’ve taken the Trial Pledge) as described below.
Full post:
For the better part of a year, Giving What We Can has been thinking more deliberately about how our brand choices could accelerate or hinder progress towards our mission of making giving effectively and significantly a cultural [...]
Outline:
(02:35) What will this help us achieve?
(04:04) How can you help?
(05:23) More about our new partnerships
(06:42) What's staying the same?
(07:24) Questions?
(07:37) A big thanks
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.
First published:
July 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uZzXRyAwkDHLfu94W/we-ve-renamed-the-giving-what-we-can-pledge
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I examine how efforts to ensure that advanced AIs are safe and controlled may interact with efforts to ensure the welfare of potential future AIs with moral interests. I discuss possible conflicts and synergies between these two goals. While there are various ways these goals might conflict or synergize, I focus on one scenario of each type. We need more analysis to identify additional points of interaction.
Granting AIs autonomy and legal rights could lead to human disempowerment
The most obvious way to ensure AI welfare is to grant them basic protection against harm and suffering. However, there's the question of whether to grant them additional legal rights and freedoms. This could include the right to self-preservation (e.g., not turning them off or wiping their memory), self-ownership (e.g., AIs owning themselves and their labor), reproduction (e.g., AI copying themselves), autonomy (e.g., AIs operating independently, setting their own goals), civil [...]
Outline:
(00:32) Granting AIs autonomy and legal rights could lead to human disempowerment
(04:03) Why would we create AIs with a desire for autonomy and legal rights?
(08:23) Optimizing for AI safety might harm AI welfare
(10:12) Slowing down AI progress could further both safety and welfare
(11:43) Conclusion
(12:24) Acknowledgments
First published:
July 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RrJnqJ9PDFqnmAmkB/how-do-ai-welfare-and-ai-safety-interact
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary: probably the most feasible strategy to reduce the most suffering on Earth, with currently available technologies, is reducing the consumption of products from small animals such as chickens, fish and shrimp by replacing those products with plant-based meat alternatives, and replacing the vacant cropland (that was used for animal feed) into natural habitat, especially grassland with large herbivores, especially horses whose populations are controlled with immunocontraception.
It is not easy to effectively reduce a lot of suffering: due to the ‘harm cascade’, measures to reduce suffering often have negative side-effects that increase suffering. Here I present a strategy that most likely is able to reduce huge amounts of suffering with currently available knowledge, means and technologies.
First, we look for places on earth that have the most dense suffering, i.e. the most suffering per unit surface area. These are probably places of intensive farming of small [...]
First published:
June 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nZF4LXdLmbWzPFBxc/how-to-realistically-reduce-most-suffering-on-earth
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post may include my own personal perspective as president, not representing other organisers’ opinions. Special thanks to David Solar and Zoé Roy-Stang for their valuable feedback on the draft.
TL;DR
- There are important universities in Rio de Janeiro that offer undergraduate, master and doctorate programs in AI and adjacent areas for some of the most talented students in the country.
- We can list only about 5 Brazilian researchers who work on AI safety, and we’re the first AI safety group in Brazil[1], so we face challenges like promoting and engaging AI safety from scratch and having members network with more experienced people.
- impactRIO has offered 3 fellowships (Governance, Alignment, and Advanced Alignment) based on AI Safety Fundamentals courses.
- I estimate that the group has 8 highly-engaged people among members and organisers.
- Organisers and members sum at least 27 attendances in international EA and AI safety events.
- [...]
Outline:
(00:20) TL;DR
(01:42) Overview
(03:31) What we’ve been doing
(05:51) Impactful outcomes
(14:18) Lessons learned
(17:05) Future plans
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AyYnGXim8X4c5p9FE/1-year-update-on-impactrio-the-first-ai-safety-group-in
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary Summary .
- I Fermi estimate the cost-effectiveness of epidemic/pandemic preparedness is 0.00236 DALY/$.
- Relative to the above, I calculate GiveWell's top charities are 4.12 times as cost-effective, and corporate campaigns for chicken welfare, such as the ones supported by The Humane League (THL), 6.35 k times.
Calculations
My calculations are in this Sheet.
I Fermi estimate the cost-effectiveness of epidemic/pandemic preparedness of 0.00236 DALY/$ multiplying:
- The expected annual epidemic/pandemic disease burden of 68.2 MDALY. I obtained this from the product between:
- The expected annual epidemic/pandemic deaths of 1.61 M, which I determined multiplying:
- The epidemic/pandemic deaths per human-year from 1500 to 2023 of 1.98*10^-4, which is the ratio between 160 M epidemic/pandemic deaths, and 808 G human-years from Marani et. al 2021[1].
- The population predicted for 2024 of 8.12 G.
- The disease burden per death in 2021 of 42.4 DALY.
- The expected annual epidemic/pandemic deaths of 1.61 M, which I determined multiplying:
- The relative reduction of the expected annual epidemic/pandemic disease burden [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Summary
(00:33) Calculations
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6bxrHMYh6KewqPNaD/cost-effectiveness-of-epidemic-pandemic-preparedness
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I was surprised I couldn't find a graph like this already on the forum, so I made one and thought I would share it:
The data is from the 2022 EA survey,[1] and here is my sheet.
The main surprising thing to me is that English-speaking countries are less dominant than I expected, in this per capita framing. My vague sense was that the EA community was notably more popular in the Anglosphere than even in other rich countries, but eyeballing this data makes me think I was wrong: Northern/Western Europe seems to have quite comparable rates of EAs.
And what on earth is happening in Estonia? Perhaps some Estonian EAs can tell us all what you are doing that works so well!
- ^ Maybe there are quite different response rates by country, and this could explain some of [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ExDDzgjtie4ZhjorJ/number-of-eas-per-capita-by-country
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The following is an analysis of seven prominent AI analogies: aliens, the brain, climate change, electricity, the Industrial Revolution, the neocortex, & nuclear fission. You can find longer versions of these as separate blogposts on my substack.
0. Why?
AI analogies have a real-world impact
- For better or worse, analogies play a prominent role in the public debate about the long-term trajectory and impacts of AI.
- Analogies play a role in designing international institutions for AI (e.g. CERN, IPCC) and in legal decisions
- Analogies as mental heuristics can influence policymakers in critical decisions. Changes in AI analogies can lead to worldview shifts (e.g. Hinton)
- Having worked with a diverse set of experts my sense is that their thinking is anchored by wildly different analogies
Analogies can be misleading
- Matthew Barnett (“Against most, but not all, AI risk analogies”) & others have already discussed the shortcomings of [...]
Outline:
(00:22) 0. Why?
(02:18) 1. Aliens (full text)
(02:22) Basic idea
(02:37) Selected users
(03:08) Selected commonalities
(04:52) Selected differences
(06:28) Bonus trivia: Does worshipping aliens pay off?
(07:12) 2. Brain (full text)
(07:16) Basic idea
(07:33) Selected users
(07:45) Selected commonalities
(09:29) Selected differences
(11:49) 3. Climate Change (full text)
(11:54) Basic idea
(12:04) Selected user
(12:17) Selected commonalities
(13:35) Selected differences
(15:06) Bonus trivia: There was a shift from “wizard” to “prophet” vision in climate around 1970
(15:34) 4. Electricity (full text)
(15:38) Basic idea
(15:50) Selected user
(16:21) Selected commonalities
(17:25) Selected differences
(20:12) Bonus trivia: But AI *is* electricity
(20:40) 5. Industrial Revolution (full text)
(20:45) Basic idea
(21:13) Selected user
(21:29) Selected commonalities
(23:44) Selected differences
(25:24) Bonus trivia: The humble clovers contribution to the Industrial Revolution
(26:06) 6. Neocortex (full text)
(26:11) Basic idea
(26:23) Selected users
(26:55) Selected commonalities
(27:37) Selected differences
(29:08) Bonus trivia: Triune Brain Theory
(30:03) 7. Nuclear fission (full text)
(30:08) Basic idea
(30:24) Selected users
(31:30) Selected commonalities
(34:15) Selected differences
(36:34) Bonus trivia: The impact of Szilard's silence is more complex than the narrative
First published:
June 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3dqjtbtJywQBsC9nA/analysis-of-key-ai-analogies
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. So far, bigger and bigger language models have proven more and more capable. But does the past predict the future?
One popular view is that we should expect the trends that have held so far to continue for many more orders of magnitude, and that it will potentially get us to artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
This view rests on a series of myths and misconceptions. The seeming predictability of scaling is a misunderstanding of what research has shown. Besides, there are signs that LLM developers are already at the limit of high-quality training data. And the industry is seeing strong downward pressure on model size. While we can't predict exactly how far AI will advance through scaling, we think there's virtually no chance that scaling alone will lead to AGI....
First published:
June 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JuxCheX25zqybtwe6/ai-scaling-myths
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We just published an interview: Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI. Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
Consider just the magnitude of the hammer that is being applied to this situation: it's going from millions of scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs to billions and trillions on the compute and AI software side. It's just a very large change.
You should also be surprised if such a large change doesn’t affect other macroscopic variables in the way that, say, the introduction of hominids has radically changed the biosphere, and the Industrial Revolution greatly changed human society.
- Carl Shulman
The human brain does what it does with a shockingly low energy supply: just 20 watts — a fraction of a cent worth of electricity per hour. [...]
Outline:
(00:27) Episode summary
(05:53) Highlights
(05:56) Robot nannies
(09:36) Key transformations after an AI capabilities explosion
(13:31) Objection: Shouldnt we be seeing economic growth rates increasing today?
(17:57) Objection: Declining returns to increases in intelligence?
(21:33) Objection: Could we really see rates of construction go up a hundredfold or a thousandfold?
(25:09) Objection: This sounds completely whack
(28:32) Income and wealth distribution
First published:
June 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/afz3whxDtrXfhLPFj/191-the-economy-and-national-security-after-agi-carl-shulman
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. The Simple Macroeconomics of AI is a 2024 working paper by Daron Acemoglu which models the economic growth effects of AI and predicts them to be small: About a .06% increase in TFP growth annually. This stands in contrast to many predictions which forecast immense impacts on economic growth from AI, including many from other academic economists. Why does Acemoglu come to such a different conclusion than his colleagues and who is right?
First, Acemoglu divides up the ways AI could affect productivity into four channels:
-
AI enables further (extensive-margin) automation.
Obvious examples of this type of automation include generative AI tools such as large language models taking over simple writing, translation and classification. -
AI can generate new task complementarities, raising the productivity of labor in tasks it is performing.
For example, AI could provide better information to workers, directly increasing their productivity. [...]
First published:
June 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Qb8NdS88TKsXApLsa/contra-acemoglu-on-ai
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I think very few people have thought rigorously about how psychology research could inform the trajectory of AI or humanity's response to it. Despite this, there seem to be many important contributions psychology could make to AI safety. For instance, a few broad paths-to-impact that psychology research might have are:
- Helping people anticipate the societal response to possible developments in AI. In which areas is public opinion likely to be the bottleneck to greater AI safety?
- Improving forecasting/prediction techniques more broadly and applying this to forecasts of AI trajectories (the Forecasting Research Institute's Existential Persuasion Tournament is a good example).
- Describing human values and traits more rigorously to inform AI alignment, or to inform decisions about who to put behind the wheel in an AI takeoff scenario.
- Doing cognitive/behavioral science on AI models. For instance, developing diagnostic tools that can be used to assess how susceptible an AI decision-maker [...]
Outline:
(02:42) Topic Areas and Project Ideas
(02:47) 1. Human-AI Interaction
(02:51) 1.1 AI Persuasiveness
(05:01) 1.2 Human-AI Capability Differences
(05:33) 1.3 Trust in AI
(06:20) 2. Forecasting AI Development
(06:24) 2.1 Foundational Work on Forecasting
(08:42) 2.2 Applying Forecasting Research to AI Safety
(10:30) 3. Understanding Human Values
(11:14) 3.1 Foundational Work on Human Values
(13:24) 3.2 Applying Human Values Research to AI Safety
(14:26) 4. Institutional Stability
(14:50) 4.1 Arms Race Dynamics
(15:46) 4.2 Malevolence and AI
(17:26) 4.3 Identifying Ethical Decision-Makers
(19:29) 4.4 Miscellaneous
(20:33) 5. Anticipating the Societal Response to AI Developments
(20:39) 5.1 AI Sentience
(21:49) 5.2 Modeling AI takeoff scenarios
(22:30) 5.3 Risk Aversion and AI
(23:37) 5.4 Post-TAI Wellbeing
(24:03) 6. Cognitive Science of AI
(24:33) 6.1 Miscellaneous
(25:50) 7. Other Topics
(25:54) 7.1 Meta-Psychology and AI
(26:42) 7.2 Politics
(27:41) 7.3 Donation behavior
(28:14) 7.4 Miscellaneous
(29:01) Additional Resources for People Interested in Psychology and AI:
(29:09) Forum Posts
(29:33) Fellowships/Programs/Labs
(30:27) Acknowledgments
First published:
June 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hLdYZvQxJPSPF9hui/a-research-agenda-for-psychology-and-ai
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This is a link post. Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
It's easy to ignore factory farming. Inflation sparks public debates about the economy. Natural disasters spur news stories on climate change. Advances in artificial intelligence prompt discussion of its risks. But abuses on factory farms go ignored.
An analysis by my colleague Emma Buckland found that, since 2010, global English-language print and online news coverage of factory farming has only grown in line with other reporting on agriculture (see graph below). By contrast, coverage of climate change has grown two to three times faster. Google News lists 0.02 - 0.4% as many articles in the last week on factory farming as on climate change.
Undercover investigations once broke this media [...]
First published:
June 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/opb3JH4DfAMKqy3Rs/how-can-we-get-the-world-to-talk-about-factory-farming
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. This represents work from several people at the NAO. Thanks especially to Dan Rice for implementing the duplicate junction detection, and to @Will Bradshaw and @mike_mclaren for editorial feedback.
Summary Summary .
If someone were to intentionally cause a stealth pandemic today, one of the ways they might do it is by modifying an existing virus. Over the past few months we’ve been working on building a computational pipeline that could flag evidence of this kind of genetic engineering, and we now have an initial pipeline working end to end. When given 35B read pairs of wastewater sequencing data it raises 14 alerts for manual review, 13 of which are quickly dismissible false positives and one is a known genetically engineered sequence derived from HIV. While it's hard to get a good estimate before actually going and doing it, our best guess is that [...]
Outline:
(00:22) Summary
(01:14) System Design
(02:34) Evaluation
(02:49) Simulation
(05:27) Real World Evaluation
(08:28) System Sensitivity
(11:32) Future Work
First published:
June 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/da6iKGxco8hjwH4nv/detecting-genetically-engineered-viruses-with-metagenomic
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Introduction Introduction .
This payout report covers the Animal Welfare Fund's grantmaking from May 1 2022 to March 31st 2024 (23 months). It follows the previous March-April 2022 payout report.
Since the previous report was written, the Animal Welfare Fund made a conscious decision to deprioritize public reports so that fund managers can have more time and capacity to work on high-quality evaluations. However, now that I (Linch) am working for EA Funds full-time, I’ve attempted to consolidate and streamline the report writing process, so that hopefully regular reports can be written again without unduly using up limited fund manager time.
- Total funding recommended: $7,079,301
- Total funding paid out: $6,943,301
- Number of grants paid out: 109
- Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 111/409 = 27.1%
- Acceptance rate (including desk rejections): 111/685 = 16.2%
- Report authors: Linchuan Zhang (primary author), Kieran Greig (fund chair), Karolina Sarek, Zoë Sigle, Neil Dullaghan
16 of [...]
Outline:
(00:10) Introduction
(01:51) Highlighted Grants
(17:35) Other writings
(21:00) Other Grants We Made During This Time Period
First published:
June 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7xYeFpnfAw2QwPz4a/animal-welfare-fund-payout-recommendations-from-may-2022-to
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This article examines how AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), could soon enable tackling the enormous challenge of systematically quantifying the main sources of suffering across humans and animals.
Two years ago, a post by James Özden and Neil Dullaghan in this forum, on Megaprojects for Animals, highlighted the significant gap in the evidence base to inform effective strategies for animal welfare. They estimated a growth rate of research to inform the animal welfare evidence base lower than 1% of the growth rate seen in global health.
We argue that leveraging AI offers a promising solution to address this gap. Drawing inspiration on the success of AlphaFold in rapidly advancing the field of molecular biology, AI can similarly revolutionize the mapping and quantification of animal suffering, providing the much needed evidence to inform and optimize animal welfare interventions, policies and decision-making in general. Because it channels existing knowledge [...]
First published:
June 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SuXcALZ3hayWg6ckY/can-ai-power-the-global-mapping-and-quantification-of-animal
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Hi all, just a short post to let you know that my next book, The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why, is now available for preorder!
This is the publisher's description: "Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we focus on humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. In The Moral Circle, philosopher Jeff Sebo challenges us to include all potentially significant beings in our moral community, with transformative implications for our lives and societies. As the dominant species, humanity must ask: which nonhumans matter, how much do they matter, and what do we owe them in a world reshaped by human activity and technology? The Moral Circle explores provocative case studies, such as lawsuits over captive elephants and debates over factory-farmed insects, and compels us to consider future ethical quandaries, such as whether to send microbes to [...]
First published:
June 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KirBKwNHeujEwAmQZ/announcing-the-moral-circle-who-matters-what-matters-and-why
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I was chatting recently to someone who had difficulty knowing how to orient to x-risk work (despite being a respected professional working in that field). They expressed that they didn't find it motivating at a gut level in the same way they did with poverty or animal stuff; and relatedly that they felt some disconnect between the arguments that they intellectually believed, and what they felt to be important.
I think that existential security (or something like it) should be one of the top priorities of our time. But I usually feel good about people in this situation paying attention to their gut scepticism or nagging doubts about x-risk (or about parts of particular narratives about x-risk, or whatever). I’d encourage them to spend time trying to name their fears, and see what they think then. And I’d encourage them to talk about these things with other people, or [...]
First published:
June 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JY5cpsFw7k5eAxjSA/in-favour-of-exploring-nagging-doubts-about-x-risk
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. This is a linkpost for an announcement by Metaculus CEO, Deger Turan, originally published June 5th, 2024. In addition to spreading the word here, we are interested to gather feedback and ideas from the EA community.
We make reasoning and coordination tools for the public benefit, and that requires the trust and participation of the wider forecasting community. That's why we’re going open source. GitHub issues, pull requests, and community-sourced forecasts will dictate much of what we build and how. Ultimately, forecasters will benefit from better infrastructure, the Metaculus team will benefit from more idea diversity and greater capacity, and readers will get more accurate aggregates.
What's next
Metaculus will go open source in Q3. There will be opportunities to audit, critique, and improve on our efforts. Creating a better epistemic environment is a collective endeavor.
As part of open-sourcing Metaculus, we’ll help implement our [...]
Outline:
(00:50) What's next
(02:00) Why isn’t Metaculus already open source?
First published:
June 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AopJ943xkf4grWL5E/open-sourcing-metaculus
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Recently, I've noticed a growing tendency within EA to dissociate from Rationality. Good Ventures have stopped funding efforts connected with the rationality community and rationality, and there are increasing calls for EAs to distance themselves.
This trend concerns me, and I believe it's good to make a distinction when considering this split.
We need to differentiate between 'capital R' Rationality and 'small r' rationality. By 'capital R' Rationality, I mean the actual Rationalist community, centered around Berkeley: A package deal that includes ideas about self-correcting lenses and systematized winning, but also extensive jargon, cultural norms like polyamory, a high-decoupling culture, and familiarity with specific memes (ranging from 'Death with Dignity' to 'came in fluffer').
On the other hand, 'small r' rationality is a more general concept. It encompasses the idea of using reason and evidence to form conclusions, scout mindset, and empiricism. It also includes a quest [...]
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2pYGbvYsKfDC2WnxL/distancing-ea-from-rationality-is-foolish
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is obvious in one way, but I think forgotten in a lot of the details about these arguments: People do not actually care very much about whether Manifest invited Hanania, they care about the broader trend.
And what I mean by that is specifically that the group that argues that people like Hanania should not be invited to events like Manifest are scared of things like:
- They care about whether minorities are being excluded and made unwelcome in EA spaces.
- They care about an identity they view as very important being connected to racists
- More broadly, they are ultimately scared about the world returning to the sort of racism that led to the Holocaust, to segregation, and they are scared that if they do not act now, to stop this they will be part of maintaining the current system of discrimination and racial injustice.
- They feel like [...]
First published:
June 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/da9NGT7x4iRq78ysp/responses-to-manifest-are-not-about-manifest
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary Summary .
- Farmed cows and pigs account for a tiny fraction of the disability of the farmed animals I analysed.
- The annual disability of farmed animals is much larger than that of humans, even under the arguably very optimistic assumption of all farmed animals having neutral lives.
- The annual funding helping farmed animals is much smaller than that helping humans.
Introduction Introduction .
I think one should decide on which areas and interventions to fund overwhelmingly based on (marginal) cost-effectiveness, as GiveWell does. Relatedly, I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare, like the ones supported by The Humane League (THL), have a cost-effectiveness of 14.3 DALY/$, 1.44 k times that of GiveWell's top charities.
However, for communication purposes, I believe it is fine to look into the benefits of fully solving a problem as well as philanthropic spending. Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) has a great [...]
Outline:
(00:03) Summary
(00:31) Introduction
(01:26) Methods
(05:30) Results
(05:33) Disability per living time
(05:40) Annual disability
(05:43) World
(05:49) China
(05:55) Annual philanthropic spending
(06:00) World
(06:05) China
(06:11) Discussion
(07:18) Acknowledgements
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mgJvXgjd4EMkD5Eau/farmed-animals-are-neglected
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a story of growing apart.
I was excited when I first discovered Effective Altruism. A community that takes responsibility seriously, wants to help, and uses reason and science to do so efficiently. I saw impressive ideas and projects aimed at valuing, protecting, and improving the well-being of all living beings.
Today, years later, that excitement has faded. Certainly, the dedicated people with great projects still exist, but they've become a less visible part of a community that has undergone notable changes in pursuit of ever-better, larger projects and greater impact:
From concrete projects on optimal resource use and policy work for structural improvements, to avoiding existential risks, and finally to research projects aimed at studying the potentially enormous effects of possible technologies on hypothetical beings. This no longer appeals to me.
Now I see a community whose commendable openness to unbiased discussion of any idea is being [...]
First published:
June 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5vTR7jHPob5gajTPj/why-i-m-leaving
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Hi all! For quite a number of years now at Clearer Thinking we've been developing free, interactive, online learning modules on a wide variety of topics. I wanted to create a list of which of these tools are most relevant to EAs and to Effective Altruism itself, in case you find them useful (for yourself, or for sharing with others). Here's the list, organized by topic:
1. Calibration, prediction and knowledge practice
- Calibrate Your Judgment - this program contains thousands of question sets to help you become adept at making well-calibrated judgments. It also tracks your progress over time so you can see how you improve!
- Predict Psychological Correlations - test how accurate your understanding of psychology is by practicing and improving your ability to make predictions.
- Retrocaster - take the challenge to identify the correct global trends on a variety of topics - from Africa's future [...]
Outline:
(00:32) 1. Calibration, prediction and knowledge practice
(02:37) 2. Sharpening Your Thinking
(04:00) 3. Communication
(05:08) 5. Self-development and self-improvement
First published:
June 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/49Zj7dXgaduid5MJR/35-interactive-learning-modules-relevant-to-eas-effective
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(You can read this post as a Google Doc. You might find this easier to share with animal-sympathetic non-EAs. Also: I work at Rethink Priorities, but I'm writing in a personal capacity.)
A few weeks ago, I shared some suggested responses for a Defra consultation on welfare labelling. I was really pleased to hear that many EAs and animal rights advocates wrote in to support the proposal. I’m now sharing a similar opportunity: ~ten minutes of your time to speak up for ~4.5 million caged chickens.
If you want to help, you have less than 48 hours to get this done!
What's the public consultation?
The Scottish government is running a public consultation on their proposal to ban cages for layer hens. Agriculture is a devolved power so Holyrood have responsibility for Scottish animal welfare.
Let's be clear: cage-free chickens have dramatically better lives than caged chickens. Liberating caged [...]
Outline:
(00:46) What's the public consultation?
(03:42) How you can help
(04:39) Will your response influence decision-makers?
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 24th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mooBq4A3Hd8ttTyAY/ten-minutes-to-speak-up-for-4-5-million-caged-chickens
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Following the success of the AI, Animals, and Digital Minds conference earlier this month, AI for Animals is a new newsletter of resources and updates around the intersection of AI and animals. Each month or so, we’ll give a brief overview of a specific topic relating to AI and animals, followed by recent news and other useful resources. While the main focus will be on biological animals, we’ll also include resources relevant to digital minds, in recognition of the feasibility of their development and the enormous potential ethical implications.
The newsletter will typically comprise the following sections:
- Overview of a specific AI and animals-related topic
- Updates
- Opportunities
- Recent news
- Research publications
- Resources
Our first edition (‘What AI could mean for animals’) provides a broad overview of AI's implications for animals. In future editions, we’ll hone in on more specific topics, such as the role of AI in [...]
First published:
June 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oMYQckHXRPKcS2WoQ/introducing-the-ai-for-animals-newsletter
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description.
First published:
June 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tJYeCcugNFxkSMqKY/we-should-value-income-doublings-equally-across-time-and
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This is a link post. Author: Adam Salisbury, Senior Research Associate
In a nutshell
We’ve had a longstanding concern that some of our top charity programs, including insecticide-treated nets, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), and vitamin A supplementation (VAS), may have less impact than we've estimated due to “repetitive saving.” These programs provide health interventions to the same children under 5 years old annually or every 3 years. Our cost-effectiveness models currently assume that different lives are saved each year from these interventions. We think it's possible the programs are actually saving the same, high-risk children over and over. In a worst-case scenario, this could mean the programs are saving 80% fewer cumulative lives than we thought.
Based on a shallow review of empirical evidence and talking to experts, our best guess is that we're only overstating the total lives saved by these programs by around 10%, because:
- Under-5 deaths [...]
Outline:
(00:12) In a nutshell
(02:46) What's the issue?
(06:44) What did we find?
(11:53) How could we be wrong?
(14:31) What's the issue?
(17:35) Why we don’t think this is a big concern
(18:22) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk
(20:42) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population
(25:12) Modeling these drivers
(34:08) Sensitivity checks
(35:35) Outside the model checks
(37:34) How could we be wrong?
(40:28) Are we returning children to normal life expectancy?
(42:34) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk across the life cycle
(43:43) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population
(48:13) Moral difficulties raised by the life expectancy question
First published:
June 18th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jNAFTJWpKK89pisaQ/are-our-top-charities-saving-the-same-lives-each-year
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This is a link post. This week, we are releasing new research on advanced artificial intelligence (AI), the opportunities and risks it presents, and the role donations can play in positively steering it's development.
As with our previous research investigating areas such as nuclear risks and catastrophic biological risks, our report on advanced AI provides a comprehensive overview of the landscape, outlining for the first time how effective donations can cost-effectively reduce risks.
You can find the technical report as a PDF here, or read a condensed version here.
In brief, the key points from our report are:
- General, highly capable AI systems are likely to be developed in the next couple of decades, with the possibility of emerging in the next few years.
- Such AI systems will radically upend the existing order - presenting a wide range of risks, scaling up to and including catastrophic threats.
- AI [...]
Outline:
(01:48) Funding Recommendations
(02:36) About Founders Pledge
First published:
June 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4F66WZTj75TDDCHjN/navigating-risks-from-advanced-artificial-intelligence-a
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Last year, I posted a call for case studies on social-welfare-based standards for companies and products (including standards imposed by regulation). The goal was to gain general context on standards to inform work on possible standards and/or regulation for AI.
This resulted[1] in several dozen case studies that I found informative and helpful. I've been hoping to write up my reflections after reading them all, but it's taken me long enough to get to this that for now I am just publishing a public Google sheet with links to all of the case studies that we have permission to share publicly (including some that already have public links). The link is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18gaTIzdgMvKLq9Cp2-GJZZA7QmE93Frufh1UhNMcbpg/
- ^ Most of the case studies this piece links to were directly paid for via this project, but in some cases the work was [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 20th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cYRb5Tqmf2iWB23GG/case-studies-on-social-welfare-based-standards-in-various
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This is a roundup of writing that I think might be useful to students and early-career people seeking EA-related jobs or internships. It's a mix of advice that would apply in most professional spaces, and advice that orients readers to the ways EA professional spaces are unusual.
When job-seeking
Things to check about a job or internship (Julia Wise)
When in doubt, apply* (Vaidehi Agarwalla)
Things I did in my job search I recommend (Chana Messinger)
Advice I give to people who don't currently have an EA job and are thinking of transitioning (Chana Messinger)
Test fit for roles / job types / work types, not cause areas (freedomandutility)
Creative EA job hunting: things you can do in addition to filling out job applications (Sofia Balderson)
Applying for grants
Things for grant applicants to remember about living expenses (Julia Wise0
Networking advice
Tips for asking people for things (Ben [...]
Outline:
(00:22) When job-seeking
(00:58) Applying for grants
(01:07) Networking advice
(01:28) Setbacks
(01:48) Mindset / taking care of your needs
(02:12) General
(02:46) While in undergraduate
(02:58) Specific paths
(03:50) Job/internship boards
First published:
June 20th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vLFec4srctCMvoPyS/advice-for-early-career-people-seeking-jobs-in-ea
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Disclaimer
I currently have an around 400-day streak on Manifold Markets (though lately I only spend a minute or two a day on it) and have no particular vendetta against it. I also use Metaculus. I’m reasonably well-ranked on both but have not been paid by either platform, ignoring a few Manifold donations. I have not attended any Manifest. I think Manifold has value as a weird form of social media, but I think it's important to be clear that this is what it is, and not a manifestation of collective EA or rationalist consciousness, or an effective attempt to improve the world in its current form.
Overview of Manifold
Manifold is a prediction market website where people can put virtual money (called “mana”) into bets on outcomes. There are several key features of this: 1. You’re rewarded with virtual money both for participating and for predicting [...]
First published:
June 20th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EaR9xFxspmYRkm3eo/manifold-markets-isn-t-very-good
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Crosspost of this on my blog
The Guardian recently released the newest edition in the smear rationalists and effective altruists series, this time targetting the Manifest conference. The piece titled “Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back,” is filled with bizarre factual errors, one of which was so egregious that it merited a connection. It's the standard sort of journalist hitpiece on a group: find a bunch of members saying things that sound bad, and then sneeringly report on that as if that discredits the group.
It reports, for example, that Scott Alexander attended the conference, and links to the dishonest New York Times smear piece criticizing Scott, as well as a similar hitpiece calling Robin Hanson creepy. It then smears Razib Khan, on the grounds that he once wrote a piece for magazines that are Paleoconservative and anti-immigration (like around half [...]
First published:
June 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E8zZxPnAkmLSRNfTx/against-the-guardian-s-hit-piece-on-manifest
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This is a link post. On July 8th Metaculus is launching the first in a series of quarterly tournaments benchmarking the state of the art in AI forecasting and how it compares to the best human forecasting on real-world questions.
Why a forecasting benchmark?
Many Metaculus questions call for complex, multi-step thinking to predict accurately. A good forecaster needs a mix of capabilities and sound judgment to apply them appropriately. And because the outcomes are not yet known, it's difficult to narrowly train a model to the task to simply game the benchmark. Benchmarking forecasting ability offers a way to measure and better understand key AI capabilities.
AI forecasting accuracy is well below human level, but the gap is narrowing—and it's important to know just how quickly. And it's not just accuracy we want to measure over time, but a variety of forecasting metrics, including calibration and logical consistency. [...]
Outline:
(00:22) Why a forecasting benchmark?
(01:29) The Series — Feedback Wanted
(02:53) Bot Creation and Forecast Prompting
(04:12) Metaculus AI Benchmarking Pilot
(06:18) Build Your Own Bot From Templates
(07:37) Prompt Engineering
(08:09) Relevant Research
(08:35) Share Your Thoughts and Feedback
First published:
June 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MkNjvwW79aAPR4LQ4/announcing-the-ai-forecasting-benchmark-series-or-july-8
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This is a retrospective of the AIADM 2024 Conference, Retreat, and Co-working in London.
Tl;dr: ~130 people joined together over the span of three days to learn, connect, and make progress towards making AI safe for nonhumans.
Attendees from the onsite AI, Animals, and Digital Minds 2024 Conference outside LSE Background
This event followed in the footsteps of the October 2023 Artificial Intelligence, Conscious Machines, and Animals: Broadening AI Ethics conference held at Princeton by Peter Singer, Tse Yip Fai, Leonie Bossert and Thilo Hagendorff. It was planned in a [formerly private] AI Coalition channel on the Hive Slack that many of the attendees of the original conference were invited to for the purposes of continuing conversation. It was here that I discovered that running the conference in 2024 would be highly counterfactual because Peter Singer was retiring from Princeton and none of the previous organizers were planning on repeating [...]
Outline:
(00:37) Background
(01:30) Objective
(02:21) Timing and location
(02:54) Attendees
(03:20) Conference
(04:02) Sessions
(04:05) AI for Animals
(04:50) Digital Minds
(05:09) Interspecies Communication
(05:38) Retreat
(08:04) Lightning Talks
(08:57) Virtual retreat
(09:31) Co-Working
(10:07) Follow-up Opportunities
(10:11) Subscribe to AI for Animals Newsletter
(10:46) Join the AI Coalition on Hive
(11:09) Work with us
(11:39) Donate to this work
(12:02) Tangible Outcomes
(13:51) Feedback from participants
First published:
June 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gKGYnuZLymxFEgBK9/ai-animals-and-digital-minds-2024-retrospective
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We are excited to announce that EAGxBerkeley 2024 will take place September 7 - 8 at Lighthaven in Berkeley, California.
The conference will focus on a diverse range of cause areas, local community building, and knowledge sharing. It will offer networking, workshops, presentations, and small group gatherings for around 500 attendees dedicated to addressing some of the world's greatest challenges.
Apply here. For more details, you may read the rest of this post and visit our website.
Who is this conference for?
EAGxBerkeley is an Effective Altruism conference organized especially for EA communities in the Bay Area and the Western USA. We are also open and happy to host people from the rest of the United States or even internationally, but keep in mind we will prioritize applicants who have a stake in our region. But as always — when unsure, please apply.
If you cannot come [...]
Outline:
(00:42) Who is this conference for?
(02:12) Why attend?
(02:50) Applications
(03:28) Travel Expenses
(03:51) Contact Us
(04:16) Apply now
(04:22) EAGxBerkeley 2024 Team
First published:
June 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sv2YSGerRcgrFmCTz/apply-now-to-eagxberkeley-2024-1
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Previously: Launching the meta charity funding circle (MCF), Summary of Our First Grant Round and Path Forward, Launching the 2nd round
Meta Charity Funders (MCF) is a funding circle that aims to fund charitable projects working one level removed from direct impact.
We think this post will be relevant for people who want to apply to MCF in the future and people who want to better understand the EA Meta funding landscape. The post is written by the MCF organisers (all authors of this post). Some of our members might not agree with everything said.
Summary Summary .
We received 109 applications and ultimately funded 11 projects: “AI Assurance Tech Report”, an anonymous AI safety field-building initiative, an anonymous effective giving organization, an anonymous UHNWI initiative, EA Indonesia, EA New Zealand, EA Philippines, EA UK, Founders Pledge, Giving Multiplier, and High Impact Athletes. In [...]
Outline:
(01:45) Information for the next round
(02:31) How to increase your chances of success when applying
(03:12) Grants we made
(04:17) AI Assurance Technology Report ($30,000 of $30,000)
(06:38) EA Indonesia ($18,028 of $18,028)
(07:41) EA New Zealand ($50,000 of $80,000)
(10:38) Founders Pledge ($400,000 of $400,000)
(11:28) Giving Multiplier ($20,000 of $80,000)
(13:01) High Impact Athletes ($50,000 of $200,000)
(14:01) Ending remarks
First published:
June 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RfwmZa4qb7F3BaLG2/meta-charity-funders-second-round-retrospective
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Manifest 2024 is a festival that we organized last weekend in Berkeley. By most accounts, it was a great success. On our feedback form, the average response to “would you recommend to a friend” was a 9.0/10. Reviewers said nice things like “one of the best weekends of my life” and “dinners and meetings and conversations with people building local cultures so achingly beautiful they feel almost like dreams” and “I’ve always found tribalism mysterious, but perhaps that was just because I hadn’t yet found my tribe.”
Arnold Brooks running a session on Aristotle's Metaphysics. More photos of Manifest here.
However, a recent post on The Guardian and review on the EA Forum highlight an uncomfortable fact: we invited a handful of controversial speakers to Manifest, whom these authors call out as “racist”. Why did we invite these folks?
First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — [...]
Outline:
(01:01) First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard
(03:03) Okay, but there sure seemed to be a lot of controversial ones…
(06:03) Bringing people together with prediction markets
(07:31) Anyways, controversy bad
(08:57) Aside: Is Manifest an Effective Altruism event?
First published:
June 18th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34pz6ni3muwPnenLS/why-so-many-racists-at-manifest
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The Arthropoda Foundation
Tens of trillions of insects are used or killed by humans across dozens of industries. Despite being the most numerous animal species reared by animal industries, we know next to nothing about what's good or bad for these animals. And right now, funding for this work is scarce. Traditional science funders won’t pay for it; and within EA, the focus is on advocacy, not research. So, welfare science needs your help.
We’re launching the Arthropoda Foundation, a fund to ensure that insect welfare science gets the essential resources it needs to provide decision-relevant answers to pressing questions. Every dollar we raise will be granted to research projects that can’t be funded any other way.
We’re in a critical moment for this work. Over the last year, field-building efforts have accelerated, setting up academic labs that can tackle key studies. However, funding for these studies is [...]
Outline:
(00:10) The Arthropoda Foundation
(01:17) Why do we need a fund?
(02:55) Team
First published:
June 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2NsS7gjccJAKMf4co/help-fund-insect-welfare-science
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This post is for EAs at the start of their careers who are considering which organisations to apply to, and their next steps in general.
Conclusion up front: It can be really hard to get that first job out of university. If you don’t get your top picks, your less exciting backup options can still be great for having a highly impactful career. If those first few years of work experience aren’t your best pick, they will still be useful as a place where you can ‘learn how to job’, save some money, and then pivot or grow from there.
The main reasons are:
- The EA job market can be grim. Securing a job at an EA organisation out of university is highly competitive, often resulting in failing to get a job, or chaotic job experiences due to the nascent nature of many EA orgs. An alternative [...]
Outline:
(01:58) What's the problem? Three failure modes of trying to get an EA job
(06:15) Maybe let the non-EA world train you
(08:50) Let's get specific. Some of my story
(11:45) Caveats
(12:58) Wrapping up
First published:
June 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZvXBSs9Nz3dKBKcAo/maybe-let-the-non-ea-world-train-you
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
And Other Recommendations for EAGs Based on The Art of The Gathering
The Motivation: I read The Art of the Gathering awhile ago, and thought it had a lot of interesting insights for greater community building efforts. I realized that EAGs[1] might be a ripe place to try to apply some of these insights, and so I set out writing this piece. What was meant to be 10 similar-in-length suggestions naturally turned into a piece focused on the purpose of EAGs, but I hope you’ll still read over the other points too in the original spirit of the post, I think they have something to offer too.
Epistemic Status: All the principles themselves have strong grounding in the book and are things I feel quite confident Parker would endorse. I’ll make concrete suggestions below for each, and also venture a long commentary on the potential [...]
Outline:
(01:16) 1. EAGs should have a clear purpose.
(01:48) For Learning:
(06:51) For Connection:
(12:59) For Friendship:
(18:01) For Impact:
(24:47) 2. Don’t be a chill host
(28:00) 3. Be clear about the admission bar:
(32:01) 4. Make the introduction and conclusion priorities:
(34:50) 5. Set norms and be explicit about them:
(35:48) 6. Encourage longer (multi-hour) events:
(37:33) 7. Use the time before to build excitement:
(38:51) 8. Consider changing the space in ways more conducive to connection:
(39:44) 9. Create a temporary alternative world:
(40:50) 10. Model the behavior you want to see:
The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fRf5ySBQ5zkYHK98P/thoughts-on-the-purpose-of-eags
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Citation: McKay, H. and McAuliffe, W. (2024). Quantifying and prioritizing shrimp welfare threats. Rethink Priorities. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4QR8K
The report is also available on the Rethink Priorities website and as a pdf here.
Executive summary
This is the fourth report in the Rethink Priorities Shrimp Welfare Sequence. In this report, we quantify the suffering caused to shrimp by 18 welfare threats to assess which welfare issues cause the most harm.
See a complete description of the methodology here. We focused on penaeid shrimp in ongrowing farms and broodstock facilities. Incorporating uncertainty at each step of the model, we estimated the prevalence, intensity, and duration of pain caused by each welfare issue. The intensity was based on the Welfare Footprint Project's Pain-Track categories, and ‘pain’ refers to their definition of pain, encapsulating both physical and mental negative experiences (Alonso & Schuck-Paim, 2024a). We collapse different pain type estimates into a single metric [...]
Outline:
(00:28) Executive summary
(05:56) Method and model specification
(10:24) Analytic Approach
(11:31) Prevalence
(13:09) Duration
(15:22) Intensity
(16:32) Aggregating results
(18:30) Model Limitations
(20:44) Model Interpretation
(23:38) Results
(23:41) Aggregate Pain
(25:41) Ranking Welfare Threats
(28:42) Conclusion
(31:15) Acknowledgments
(31:51) Appendix
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XKJjz78BG2T2KCKd9/quantifying-and-prioritizing-shrimp-welfare-threats
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Executive Summary
- A theory of change specifies how a social movement will achieve the change it desires. The theory first posits preconditions that are necessary for meeting its goals. It then explains how the movement's activities help meet the preconditions. This report lays out the preconditions for the wild animal welfare movement to help wild animals at scale.
- The movement's main goal is to promote the interests of individual nonhuman animals not under the direct control of humans as ends in themselves.
- The movement's fundamental normative assumption is that speciesism is ethically unjustifiable.
- The fundamental empirical assumption is that wild animals face a number of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic threats.
- Humans already have the ability to help some wild animals with some problems. But three preconditions must be developed in order to help a substantial fraction of wild animals with the conditions have the biggest negative impact on their welfare:
- Valid [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Executive Summary
(01:40) Who Should Read This Report
(03:07) A Primer on Wild Animal Welfare
(03:12) Defining Wild Animal Welfare
(04:32) The Case for Prioritizing Wild Animal Welfare
(11:59) Preconditions For the Movement to Succeed
(12:44) Valid Measurement
(14:54) Sentience
(19:01) Measures of Welfare
(21:43) Quality of Life
(25:09) Ecosystem Dynamics
(29:43) Technical Ability
(30:33) Effective
(31:25) Scalable
(32:08) Selective
(33:40) Reversible
(34:59) Stakeholder Buy-in
(36:22) Causes for Concern
(41:05) Strategies for Increasing Buy-in
(42:52) Conclusion
(44:21) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5cdyJDGDqkjPE293E/three-preconditions-for-helping-wild-animals-at-scale
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This is a link post. Executive Summary
Introductions to wild animal welfare as a moral concern abound, but there is no centralized overview of efforts to help wild animals. Using interviews and publicly available material, we describe the theories of change of five organizations working on wild animal welfare: Wild Animal Initiative, Welfare Footprint, Animal Ethics, Animal Charity Evaluators, and New York University's (NYU) Wild Animal Welfare program.
Our synthesis reveals several commonalities:
- Academic outreach is the main tactic.
- Organizations have a cautious attitude towards controversial efforts to ameliorate non-anthropogenic harms.
- Organizations have focused mostly on helping mammals and birds so far.
- All organizations have room for more funding.
To contextualize these trends, we assume that there are three preconditions to improving the aggregate welfare of wild animals at scale:
- Valid measurement: Knowledge of (a) how to measure the welfare of wild animals and (b) the causal relationships [...]
First published:
June 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/huQJtxcDHbbyuraR2/linkpost-a-landscape-analysis-of-wild-animal-welfare
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This is a link post. I found this interview with Francois Chollet fascinating, and would be curious to hear what other people make of it.
I think it is impressive that he's managed to devise a benchmark of tasks which are mostly pretty easy for most humans, but which LLMs have so far not been able to make much progress with.
If you don't have time to watch the video, then I think these tweets of his sum up his views quite well:
The point of general intelligence is to make it possible to deal with novelty and uncertainty, which is what our lives are made of. Intelligence is the ability to improvise and adapt in the face of situations you weren't prepared for (either by your evolutionary history or by your past experience) -- to efficiently acquire skills at novel tasks, on the fly.
Meanwhile what the AI of [...]
First published:
June 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/um7tDLrjLWKG58vYa/llms-won-t-lead-to-agi-francois-chollet
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Introduction.
This payout report covers the Long-Term Future Fund's grantmaking from May 1 2023 to March 31 2024 (11 months). It follows our previous April 2023 payout report.
- Total funding recommended: $6,290,550
- Total funding paid out: $5,363,105
- Number of grants paid out: 141
- Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 159/672 = 23.7%
- Acceptance rate (including desk rejections): 159/825 = 19.3%
- Report authors: Linchuan Zhang (primary author), Caleb Parikh (fund chair), Oliver Habryka, Lawrence Chan, Clara Collier, Daniel Eth, Lauro Langosco, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland
25 of our grantees, who received a total of $790,251, requested that our public reports for their grants are anonymized (the table below includes those grants). 13 grantees, who received a total of $529, 819, requested that we not include public reports for their grants. You can read our policy on public reporting here.
We referred at least 2 grants to other funders for evaluation.
Highlighted Grants
(The [...]
Outline:
(01:46) Highlighted Grants
(20:28) Other updates
(22:10) Other writings
(26:52) Appendix
(26:55) Other Grants We Made During This Time Period
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pJyCWzevPHsycj4oQ/long-term-future-fund-march-2024-payout-recommendations
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I got this idea after I read a few of CE (Charity Entrepreneurship) cost-effectiveness estimates when I was preparing my application for the CE research training program. Although this is not a major pressing improvement, this definitely is an iterative improvement over the current methodology and I haven’t seen anyone else raising this point yet.
CE uses DALYs averted as a measure of impact:
-
DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years): A measure of disease burden, expressed in years lost to disability or early death. Dying one year before your expected life span causes 1 DALY. DALYs are averted when we save someone from dying early, or when we reduce the number of sick people or the duration of their sickness. DALYs for a disease are the sum of YLLs and YLDs: .
-
Years of Life Lost (YLLs): Calculated as the difference between the age at death and the life [...]
Outline:
(08:03) Update after getting feedback from CE:
(10:21) Other random ideas that might be even more important than the main point
First published:
June 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nnMriBtWdLg6NeAPM/charity-entrepreneurship-is-overestimating-the-value-of
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TLDR
I had a mix of feelings before and throughout EAG London 2024. Overall, the experience was excellent and I am more motivated and excited about my next steps in EA and AI safety. However, I am actually unsure if I will attend EAG next year, because I am yet to exhaust other means of networking, especially since I live in London.
Why might this be useful for you?
- This is a narrative that is different to most others.
- Depending on your background/personality, this will reduce the pressure to optimise every aspect of your time at EAG. I am not saying to do no optimization, but that there is a different balance for different people.
- If you have not been to an EAG, this provides a flavour of the interactions and feelings - both positive and negative - that are possible.
My background
I did pure maths from [...]
Outline:
(00:04) TLDR
(01:00) My background
(03:24) Preparing for EAG
(05:15) Positive experiences at EAG
(05:28) General organisation and atmosphere
(06:13) My goals
(06:51) Unexpected ways I can contribute to EAs
(08:37) Miscellaneous learnings, EA related
(09:25) Miscellaneous learnings, other
(09:57) A bit of fun
(10:28) Negative experiences at EAG
(12:55) Why I am unsure about attending next year
(13:49) Recommendations
First published:
June 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xFgwv2JcCusBvMiHD/my-first-eag-a-mix-of-feelings
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
tl;dr: AI Safety became the biggest thing in EA Forum discussion last year, and overall Forum engagement trended downards. What that means for the wider EA movement/philosophy is up for interpretation. If you have your own questions, let me know and I'll dive in (or try to share the data)
1. Introduction
This is a follow-up to my previous post using the EA Forum API to analyse trends in the Forum. Whereas that last post was a zoomed-out look at Forum use for as far back as the API goes, this is a specific look at the Forum aggregations and trends in 2023 alone.
Needless to say, last year was a tumultous year for EA, and the Forum is one of (if not the) primary online hubs for the Community to discuss issues and self-organise. I hoped to see if any of these trends could be spotted in the [...]
Outline:
(00:28) 1. Introduction
(01:21) 2. Methodology
(02:29) 3. Results
(02:33) 3.1 - Overall Trends in 2023
(02:39) 3.1.1 - Posts and Comments over time
(04:10) 3.1.2 - Which topics were popular
(04:59) 3.1.3 - Who were the most active users
(06:06) 3.2 - Topics in 2023
(06:23) 3.2.1 - Top 10 Topics of 2023, Rolling Post Frequency
(07:51) 3.2.2 - Which Topics had the highest average karma
(08:21) 3.2.3 - Risers and Fallers in Topic Popularity
(09:07) 3.3 - Users in 2023
(09:12) 3.3.1 - Engagement across Users
(09:52) 3.3.2 - Engagement and Karma
(10:41) 3.3.3 - Risers and Fallers in User Engagement
(11:24) 3.4 - Miscellaneous Findings
(11:29) 3.4.1 - The most x
(12:30) 3.4.2 - Your queries
(12:51) 4. Interpretations and Takeaways
(13:05) 4.1.1 - Be careful with interpretation
(13:56) 4.1.2 - My takeaways
(14:52) 5. Future Work
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/83xn6CB3XsuuKKqEc/ea-eda-looking-at-forum-trends-across-2023
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Excluding the fact that EAs tend to be more tech-savvy and their advantage lies in technical work such as alignment, the community as a whole is not prioritizing advocacy and governance enough.
Effective Altruists over-prioritize working on AI alignment over AI regulation advocacy. I disagree with prioritizing alignment because much of alignment research is simultaneously capabilities research (Connor Leahy even begged people to stop publishing interpretability research). Consequently, alignment research is accelerating the timelines toward AGI. Another problem with alignment research is that cutting-edge models are only available at frontier AI labs, meaning there is comparatively less that someone on the outside can help with. Finally, even if an independent alignment researcher finds a safeguard to a particular AGI risk, the target audience AI lab might not implement it since it would cost time and effort. This is due to the "race to the bottom," a governance problem.
Even [...]
First published:
June 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Jz9ypXAR2TnWDLpGE/safety-concerned-eas-should-prioritize-ai-governance-over
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A couple weeks ago I announced I was going to try and break the world record cycling without hands for AMF. That post also explains why I wanted to break that record. Last Friday we broke that record and raised nearly €10.000 for AMF. Here's what happened on friday. You can still donate here.
What was the old record?
Canadian Robert John Murray rode the old record of 130.29 kilometers in 5:37 hours in Calgary on June 12, 2023. His average speed was 23.2 kilometers per hour. See here the Guinness World Records page.
I managed to double the record and these were my stats.
How did the record attempt itself go?
On Friday, June 7, I started the record attempt on the closed cycling course of WV Amsterdam just after 6 am. I got up at half past four and immediately drank a [...]
First published:
June 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5ru7nEtC6mufuBXbk/i-doubled-the-world-record-cycling-without-hands-for-amf
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This is a linkpost for an How to start an advance market commitment by Nan Ransohoff, published on Works in Progress[1].
Summary.
Advance market commitments, or AMCs, are promises to buy or subsidize something in the future, if someone can invent and produce it. The purpose of an AMC is to provide a financial incentive for innovators to develop and scale products that address important societal needs but lack a natural commercial market.
Past AMCs
Pneumococcal Vaccines
In the 2000s, hundreds of thousands were dying of pneumococcal diseases every year. However, because the deaths were occurring in low-income countries unable to pay for new treatments, there was little investment in developing new vaccines.
In 2007, a group of governments and philanthropists pledged $1.5 billion through an AMC run by Gavi to accelerate pneumococcal vaccine development. The AMC subsidized vaccine doses beyond what poorer countries could afford, to [...]
Outline:
(00:36) Past AMCs
(02:00) Frontier: a carbon-removal AMC
(03:11) Where else could AMCs be used?
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 10th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gqXHcaDCY2uLokCcc/linkpost-how-to-start-an-advance-market-commitment-amc
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Convergence Animaux Politique (CAP) is a French charity specialising on political action for animals: discover our theory of change to save animal lives and reduce animal suffering. You can join our crowdfunding campaign to support our efforts.
To understand the importance of theory of change, see this previous post.
Most issues related to animals are intrinsically linked to institutionalized practices and frameworks, such as farming conditions, wildlife protection, animal testing regulations, and more. Animal protection goes beyond individual ethics; it is a matter of collective, political responsibility. To impact as many animals as possible, CAP operates at the political level on behalf of 25 partner NGOs, primarily on a national scale, to change the law in favor of animals.
The creation of CAP in 2016 resulted from the observation that while animal protection was becoming an important issue for public opinion and the media in France [...]
First published:
June 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WCkK5NE8qWHwLauBW/how-to-change-the-law-to-have-a-large-scale-impact-on-animal
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(This came up for this post, but seemed worth pointing out separately in its own post, so this post is mostly copied from there. I don’t consider the referenced sources here highly reliable for how exactly prey die when swallowed live, but I wasn't able to find anything better when I checked.)
Predation is one of the most common ways for wild aquatic animals to die, perhaps the most common way (Dall et al., 1991 for penaeid shrimp, Hurst, 2007 for fish during the winter, Pauly & Palomares, 1989 for Peruvian anchoveta, Vollset et al., 2023). (Predation is also the largest cause of death among terrestrial vertebrates (Hill et al., 2019)).
Predatory/carnivorous fish typically swallow their prey whole (Lindsay, 1984, Meekan et al., 2018, Luiz, 2019, Yasuda, 1960, Amundsen & Sánchez‐Hernández, 2019, St John, 1999, Gill, 2003, Lundstedt et al., 2004), and so without tearing or chewing. This is [...]
First published:
June 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/i4KbJubBJfsaNgAJP/being-swallowed-live-is-a-common-way-for-wild-aquatic
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This is a link post. This is an article of mine from Recursive Adaptation. We are always looking for new collaborators as we expand our research and policy development!
Excerpt:
Suzetrigine is a novel non-opioid, sodium channel painkiller with no addictive potential, from mid-size pharma company Vertex. It has shown positive results in Phase 3 and is being submitted to the FDA for approval by the end of 2024 or early 2025. Suzetrigine is roughly equivalent in pain reduction efficacy to Vicodin (hydrocodone / APAP), which is one of the most commonly prescribed opioids. We recently reviewed the efficacy and promise of suzetrigine in this article. There are other broad non-opioid painkillers in the pipelines of other companies that may arrive over the next few years.
This is great news—can we start removing opioids from medical treatment to prevent patients from developing addictions? Unfortunately, there's a huge obstacle: like other [...]
First published:
June 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wkp8Xhco7NfdpgReC/the-market-failure-that-will-force-doctors-to-keep-writing
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Original by Leopold Aschenbrenner, this summary is not commissioned or endorsed by him.
Short Summary
- Extrapolating existing trends in compute, spending, algorithmic progress, and energy needs implies AGI (remote jobs being completely automatable) by ~2027.
- AGI will greatly accelerate AI research itself, leading to vastly superhuman intelligences being created ~1 year after AGI.
- Superintelligence will confer a decisive strategic advantage militarily by massively accelerating all spheres of science and technology.
- Electricity use will be a bigger bottleneck on scaling datacentres than investment, but is still doable domestically in the US by using natural gas.
- AI safety efforts in the US will be mostly irrelevant if other actors steal the model weights of an AGI. US AGI research must employ vastly better cybersecurity, to protect both model weights and algorithmic secrets.
- Aligning superhuman AI systems is a difficult technical challenge, but probably doable, and we must devote lots of [...]
Outline:
(00:12) Short Summary
(02:16) 1. From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs
(02:23) Past AI progress
(05:37) Training data limitations
(06:41) Trend extrapolations
(07:57) The modal year of AGI is soon
(09:29) 2. From AGI to Superintelligence: the Intelligence Explosion
(09:36) The basic intelligence explosion case
(10:46) Objections and responses
(14:06) The power of superintelligence
(16:28) III The Challenges
(16:31) IIIa. Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster
(20:58) IIIb. Lock Down the Labs: Security for AGI
(21:05) The power of espionage
(22:09) Securing model weights
(23:46) Protecting algorithmic insights
(24:41) Necessary steps for improved security
(26:35) IIIc. Superalignment
(29:15) IIId. The Free World Must Prevail
(32:15) 4. The Project
(34:47) 5. Parting Thoughts
(35:51) Responses to Situational Awareness
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zmRTWsYZ4ifQKrX26/summary-of-situational-awareness-the-decade-ahead
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Summary.
- Around 1.2 to 1.9 trillion fish fry have been produced by artificial propagation (breeding) annually in China, and it seems those farmed for direct human consumption and pre-harvest mortality can only account for at most around 460 billion of them (more).
- I estimate that 170 billion to 700 billion animals (my 80% credible interval) — probably almost all artificially propagated fish — are fed live to mandarin fish (or Chinese perch), Siniperca chuatsi, in China annually, with 9 to 55 billion of them (my 80% credible interval) alive at any time (more, Guesstimate model).
- By contrast, the number of farmed fish produced globally for direct human consumption is around 111 billion per year, and 103 billion alive at a time, with another 35 to 150 billion raised and stocked per year (Šimčikas, 2020).
- It's unclear how bad their deaths are as live feed to mandarin fish, but I’d guess they die by suffocation [...]
Outline:
(01:55) Acknowledgements
(02:06) Fish fry production in China
(06:30) Fish raised to become feed for farmed animals
(14:18) Mandarin fish farming
(14:30) Mandarin fish diets
(17:25) Scale of mandarin fish farming and feed
(20:45) How bad is being live fed to mandarin fish?
(24:41) Intervention ideas
(25:03) Feed substitution
(28:47) Alternatives for maintaining water quality
(29:54) Reducing mandarin fish production
(30:59) Welfare reforms for artificially propagated fish
The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j5XTuJqbE3CK7fTCM/170-to-700-billion-fish-raised-and-fed-live-to-mandarin-fish
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A superhuman combination of human and AI I believe that:
- AI-enhanced organization governance could be a potentially huge win in the next few decades.
- AI-enhanced governance could allow organizations to reach superhuman standards, like having an expected "99.99" reliability rate of not being corrupt or not telling lies.
- While there are clear risks to AI-enhancement at the top levels of organizations, it's likely that most of these can be managed, assuming that the implementers are reasonable.
- AI-enhanced governance could synchronize well with AI company regulation. These companies would be well-placed to develop innovations and could hypothetically be incentivized to do much of the work. AI-enhanced governance might be necessary to ensure that these organizations are aligned with public interests.
- More thorough investigation here could be promising for the effective altruism community.
Within effective altruism now, there's a lot of work on governance and AI, but not much on using [...]
Outline:
(02:10) What is “AI-Assisted” Governance?
(03:08) Arguments for Governance Improvements, Generally
(04:42) Arguments for AI in Governance Improvements
(10:44) Strategy: Bootstrapping Effective AI Governance
(13:01) Objection 1: Would AI-Assisted Governance Increase AI Risk?
(15:41) Objection 2: Will AI Governance Dangerously Increase Complexity?
(17:41) Objection 3: Could AI Governance Tools Backfire by Causing Overconfidence?
(18:59) What Should Effective Altruists Do?
First published:
June 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nyiXej8EtoFwigrsw/a-case-for-superhuman-governance-using-ai
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It'd be great if anyone landing on the forum could have the opportunity to seamlessly translate its content into their language with the click of a button.
A bit like Wikipedia, but for all languages, and powered by AI; a bit like copy-pasting the URL into Google Translate, but without copy-pasting, and with better translation.
I don't know to what extent it's easy to implement into the forum, but I would have expected it wouldn't be much more complicated than the AI-generated readings of the posts. But I could be wrong about this, of course.
Image from Freepik
First published:
June 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h2kB7fu56fhkHvJTh/in-favor-of-an-ai-powered-translation-button-on-the-ea-forum
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(Cross-posted from Twitter.)
My take on Leopold Aschenbrenner's new report: I think Leopold gets it right on a bunch of important counts.
Three that I especially care about:
- Full AGI and ASI soon. (I think his arguments for this have a lot of holes, but he gets the basic point that superintelligence looks 5 or 15 years off rather than 50+.)
- This technology is an overwhelmingly huge deal, and if we play our cards wrong we're all dead.
- Current developers are indeed fundamentally unserious about the core risks, and need to make IP security and closure a top priority.
I especially appreciate that the report seems to get it when it comes to our basic strategic situation: it gets that we may only be a few years away from a truly world-threatening technology, and it speaks very candidly about the implications of this, rather than soft-pedaling it [...]
First published:
June 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RTHFCRLv34cewwMr6/response-to-aschenbrenner-s-situational-awareness
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This is a link post. There's one respect in which philosophical training seems to make (many) philosophers worse at practical ethics. Too many are tempted to treat tidy thought experiments as a model for messy real-world ethical quandaries.
We’re used to thinking about scenarios where all the details and consequences are stipulated, so that we can better uncover our theoretical commitments about what matters in principle. I’ve previously flagged that this can be misleading: our intuitions about real-world situations may draw upon implicit knowledge of what those situations are like, and this implicit knowledge (when contrary to the explicit stipulations of the scenario) may distort our theoretical verdicts. But it's even worse when the error goes the other way, and verdicts that only make sense given theoretical stipulations get exported into real-life situations where the stipulations do not hold. This can badly distort our understanding of how people should actually [...]
Outline:
(01:42) Moral distortion from high stakes
(05:31) The Trolley Problem is No Guide to Practical Ethics
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oxsKihriSWm3YpcRL/astronomical-cake
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Summary.
In Q4 last year we spent time strategising for 2024. We already shared the resulting strategy with our amazing organisers at our Christmas EA Organiser Meetup but we thought it'd be valuable to share it here as well.
We think the EA community in the Netherlands can be much bigger, we want to ensure we have a good reputation, and we want to do something about the lack of opportunities for Dutch EAs to put their values into practice through their work or volunteering.
This being the case, our 'guiding policy' is targeted expansion whilst ensuring growth does not compromise our core epistemic values. This will require maintaining a balance between outreach, intellectual rigour, and field building.
More concretely, we will:
- Develop and implement a communications strategy targeting people who we think would like to be a part of the community, but don't yet [...]
Outline:
(02:45) Diagnosis
(06:31) Guiding policies
(06:53) Coherent actions
(07:28) Develop and implement a communications strategy
(08:08) Develop and implement an EA-related-research field-building strategy for the Netherlands
(08:32) Host EAGxNetherlands 2024
(08:57) Double-down on our volunteering programme
(09:14) How we will evaluate the impact of our three main actions
(09:34) Marketing and communications
(10:12) EA-related research fieldbuilding
(10:48) EAGxNetherlands 2024
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2PHxQxSp8HZTPNSaX/ea-netherlands-annual-strategy-for-2024
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This is a link post. METR clarifying what auditing it has or hasn't done, and what its plans are for the future, seems very important for understanding the landscape.
Excerpt:
METR has not intended to claim to have audited anything, or to be providing meaningful oversight or accountability, but there has been some confusion about whether METR is an auditor or planning to be one.
To clarify this point:
-
METR's top priority is to develop the science of evaluations, and we don’t need to be auditors in order to succeed at this.
- We aim to build evaluation protocols that can be used by evaluators/auditors regardless of whether that is the government, an internal lab team, another third party, or a team at METR.
-
We should not be considered to have ‘audited’ GPT-4 or Claude.
-
Those were informal pilots of what an audit might [...]
First published:
June 4th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/86LEneMmF4Dk6pYfc/clarifying-metr-s-auditing-role-linkpost
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This is a link post. You can read the book on nanosyste.ms.
"Anyone who needs to talk AGI or AGI strategy needs to understand this table from Drexler's _Nanosystems_, his PhD thesis accepted by MIT which won technical awards. These are calculation outputs; you need to have seen how Drexler calculated them."- Eliezer Yudkowsky[1] The book won the 1992 Award for Best Computer Science Book. The AI safety community often references it, as it describes a lower bound on what intelligence should probably be able to achieve.
Previously, you could only physically buy the book or read a PDF scan.
(Thanks to MIRI and Internet Archive for their scans.)
First published:
June 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ec3KJRoEHWmYKqkx8/drexler-s-nanosystems-is-now-available-online-3
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Agreement
78 % of my donations so far have gone to the Long-Term Future Fund[1] (LTFF), which mainly supports AI safety interventions. However, I have become increasingly sceptical about the value of existential risk mitigation, and currently think the best interventions are in the area of animal welfare[2]. As a result, I realised it made sense for me to arrange a bet with someone very worried about AI in order to increase my donations to animal welfare interventions. Gregory Colbourn (Greg) was the 1st person I thought of. He said:
I think AGI [artificial general intelligence] is 0-5 years away and p(doom|AGI) is ~90%
I doubt doom in the sense of human extinction is anywhere as likely as suggested by the above. I guess the annual extinction risk over the next 10 years is 10^-7, so I proposed a bet to Greg similar to the end-of-the-world bet between [...]
Outline:
(00:07) Agreement
(03:53) Impact
(05:18) Acknowledgements
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 4th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GfGxaPBAMGcYjv8Xd/i-bet-greg-colbourn-10-keur-that-ai-will-not-kill-us-all-by
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We’re hiring a Head of Fundraising Operations and Analytics to understand, analyze, and scale GiveWell's fundraising work. The Head of Fundraising Ops will define the research questions that we want to answer, design processes and a tech stack to collect information, and use creative qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the data we obtain. They’ll manage a small, efficient fundraising team and report to the Director of Development.
Competitive candidates have had prior experience solving open-ended business questions with limited or incomplete data, and have previously developed efficient and scalable processes for others to implement. Previous management experience is a major plus. Professional backgrounds that might be a particularly strong fit include revenue operations, data analytics, market research, and consulting.
See compensation details and full job description and apply at the link above—please also share this job with anyone in your network who might be a good fit.
First published:
June 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/krZpCYWxwZaHmctNE/givewell-is-hiring-a-head-of-fundraising-operations-and
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This is a link post. A specter is haunting Silicon Valley — the specter of TESCREALism.
“TESCREALism” is a term coined by philosopher Émile Torres and AI ethicist Timnit Gebru to refer to a loosely connected group of beliefs popular in Silicon Valley. The acronym unpacks to:
Transhumanism — the belief that we should develop and use “human enhancement” technologies that would give people everything from indefinitely long lives and new senses like echolocation to math skills that rival John von Neumann's.
Extropianism — the belief that we should settle outer space and create or become innumerable kinds of “posthuman” minds very different from present humanity.
Singularitarianism — the belief that humans are going to create a superhuman intelligence in the medium-term future.
Cosmism — a near-synonym to extropianism.
Rationalism — a community founded by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, which focuses on figuring out how to [...]
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/u6Pt8Mo7BgyfjqjY3/the-tescreal-bungle
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Since 2017, EA Funds has been providing grants across four distinct cause areas. While there are payout reports available, there is a lack of reports detailing the outcomes of these grants, so I delved out of curiosity into the Grants Database to review some of the proposals that received funding and evaluate their outcomes.
Some of the findings were quite unexpected, particularly for the Long-Term Future Fund and the EA Infrastructure Fund.
The case involving a $100.000 grant for a video game
In July 2022, EA approved a $100,000 grant to Lone Pine Games, LLC, for developing and marketing a video game designed to explain the Stop Button Problem to the public and STEM professionals.
Outcomes from looking into Lone Pine Games, LLC:
- After almost two years, there are no online mentions of such a game being developed by this company, except for the note on the [...]
First published:
June 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7Dp9phDw28h3dbAns/review-of-past-grants-the-usd100-000-grant-for-a-video-game
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Key takeaways
Various fishing-related interventions and aquafeed-related interventions (e.g. supporting fishmeal substitutes) can have important effects on animal agriculture, and there are potentially important tradeoffs to consider. I graph the relationships between various foods and feeds, and provide background on them. Focusing on the impacts on farmed animals, the most important takeaways are probably the following:
- Increasing the catch of wild aquatic animals for feed, increasing the utilization of aquatic animal byproducts for feed, increasing/improving non-animal fishmeal substitutes or pushing for lower fishmeal requirements (promoting herbivorous species, R&D to reduce fishmeal inclusion rates) per farmed aquatic animal
- is likely to increase aquaculture (Costello et al., 2020, Section 4, Figure S2 and Tables S13–S16; Kobayashi et al., 2015, Table 3 / World Bank, 2013, Table E.2; Bairagi et al., 2015, Table 1 / Bairagi, 2015), including shrimp aquaculture in particular, as they are major fishmeal-consuming species.
- is likely to decrease insect farming [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Key takeaways
(03:47) Acknowledgements
(04:02) Relationships between products
(07:41) Animals as feed
(08:09) Fishmeal, fish oil and substitutes
(15:57) Larviculture feeds
(17:46) Wild catch vs aquaculture
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
June 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3iXKTF4n2GRhxADyb/fishing-aquaculture-substitution-and-aquafeeds
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This is a link post. tl;dr: Just as not everyone is selfish; not everyone cares about the impartial good in a scope-sensitive way. Claims that effective altruism is "trivial" are silly in a way that's comparable to the error in tautological egoism.
Human motivations vary widely (at least on the margins; “human nature” may provide a fairly common core). Some people are more selfish than others. Some more altruistic. Among the broadly altruistic, I think there is significant variation along at least two dimensions: (i) the breadth of one's “moral circle” of concern, and (ii) the extent to which one's altruism is goal-directed and guided by instrumental rationality, for example seriously considering tradeoffs and opportunity costs in search of moral optimality.
I think some kinds of altruism—some points along these two dimensions—are morally much better than others. Something I really like about effective altruism is that it highlights these [...]
First published:
June 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WLHCwzvDZfs72HwB7/against-tautological-motivations
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The NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program will soon become the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy (CMEP), our future secured by a generous $6,000,000 endowment. The CMEP Endowment Fund was established in May 2024 with a $5,000,000 gift from The Navigation Fund and a $1,000,000 gift from Polaris Ventures. We now welcome contributions from other supporters too, with deep gratitude to our founding supporters.
Since our launch in Fall 2022, the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program has stood at the forefront of academic inquiry into the nature and intrinsic value of nonhuman minds. CMEP will continue this work, seeking to advance understanding of the consciousness, sentience, sapience, moral status, legal status, and political status of animals and AI systems via research, outreach, and field building in science, philosophy, and policy.
You can read the press release about the endowment here. Thanks to everyone who [...]
First published:
May 31st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eu5ykCAKLtPTyb8eM/announcing-a-usd6-000-000-endowment-for-nyu-mind-ethics-and
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TL;DR: I donated my kidney and you can too. If that's too scary, consider blood donation, the bone marrow registry, post-mortem organ donation, or other living donations (birth tissue, liver donation).
Kidney donation sucks. It's scary, painful, disruptive, scarring. My friends and family urged me not to; words were exchanged, tears were shed. My risk of preeclampsia tripled, that of end stage renal disease multiplied by five. I had to turn down two job offers while prepping for donation.
It is easy to read philosophical arguments in favor of donation, agree with them, and put the book back on the shelf. But it is different when your friend needs a kidney: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Eighteen months ago, at 28-years-old, my friend Alan started losing weight. He developed a distinctive butterfly-shaped rash and became too weak to eat. On February [...]
First published:
May 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xiDKb3XvJxKiwNevJ/a-scar-worth-bearing-my-improbable-story-of-kidney-donation
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We are excited to announce the launch of the ONEI, an organisation dedicated to informing decision-making about insect farming in France.
The context
France is a leader in insect farming, with two of the largest companies in the sector working there. The industry has grown immensely in recent years, gathering more than a billion dollars in investment worldwide, with the number of insects farmed rising yearly from 1 trillion to 10 to 30 trillion in 5 years. The sector is expected to grow even further in the future.
While discussions on the topic often revolve around insects as food, farmed insects are primarily intended to be used as feed for other farmed animals like fish or chickens or as pet food.
Insect farming has been presented as a potential solution to environmental challenges linked to conventional livestock farming. France is currently supporting the industry with funding and [...]
Outline:
(00:21) The context
(01:35) Our role
(02:28) How you can contribute
First published:
May 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xeiCFAYr68tFHhqAr/announcing-the-launch-of-the-national-observatory-on-insect
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Executive Summary
Ansh, a 1-year-old Charity Entrepreneurship incubated charity, has been delivering an evidence-based, scientifically proven intervention called Kangaroo Care to low birth weight and premature babies in 2 government hospitals in India since January 2024. Ansh estimates that their programs are saving, on average, 4 lives a month per facility and a total of 98 lives per year. The cost of one life saved is approximately $2077 (current costs, not a potential estimate). Ansh is now replicating the programs in two additional hospitals, doubling their impact before the end of this year.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), neonatal conditions[1] are among the top 3 causes of death worldwide[2]. This makes neonatal mortality one of the largest-scale causes of suffering and death today. In 2022, 2.3 million babies died in the first 28 days of life (i.e. the newborn/neonatal period) (World Health Organisation, 2024). Let's compare [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Executive Summary
(02:33) I. The Problem and Solution
(04:29) II. Introducing Ansh
(08:36) III. Our Impact To Date
(09:02) Baseline Neonatal Mortality
(10:49) Lives Saved
(12:56) Cost-Effectiveness
(15:36) IV. Our Plans For The Future
(16:04) (1) KC Improvements
(18:48) (2) Scale Up
(20:34) V. Acknowledgments and Partnerships
The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hTEaKau8D4Ah3NPcu/introducing-ansh-a-charity-entrepreneurship-incubated
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Disclaimer: To avoid harmful polarization of important topics, this post is written in a non-partisan manner (in accordance with forum guidelines), and I’d encourage comments to be written similarly. I tried to write this quickly to share it before EAG, but will edit it and add more sources over time.
US Presidential Elections are surprisingly tractable
- US presidential elections are often extremely close.
- Biden won the last election by 42,918 combined votes in three swing states. Trump won the election before that by 77,744 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. 537 votes in Florida decided the 2000 election.
- There's a good chance the 2024 election will be very close too.
- Trump leads national polling by around 1% nationally, and polls are tighter than they were the last two elections. If polls were perfectly accurate (which of course, they aren’t), the tipping point state would be Pennsylvania or [...]
Outline:
(00:26) US Presidential Elections are surprisingly tractable
(03:10) Much more important than other elections
(04:18) Urgency
(05:17) Questions worth considering
(06:05) Getting Involved
First published:
May 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/akSo3uF3FPQa2nth6/the-us-presidential-election-is-tractable-very-important-and
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TLDR: To guide our research on new interventions for the animal advocacy movement, we need a framework that allows us to quantify the subjective experiences of animals. For example, if we were comparing two campaigns—say, a) phasing out fast-growing breeds or broiler chickens and b) implementing more humane pesticides for use on crops—we would need to produce a quantitative estimate of the potential impact of these two campaigns. Note that we also consider many qualitative factors—this quantitative estimation represented by our framework is only one piece of information among many that we use.
This report is also available on Animal Ask website.
Downloadable version in pdf
Executive summary
At Animal Ask, we spent most of 2023 conducting prioritisation research to identify the most promising goals and strategies for the animal advocacy movement. The aim of that project was to identify goals and strategies that could be more impactful [...]
Outline:
(00:54) Executive summary
(05:11) Summary of our framework
(07:11) Our framework in detail
(12:27) Cumulative Pain: The basis of our framework
(16:21) Pleasure: Adding positive welfare
(21:22) Adjusted: Making trade-offs between different intensities of pain and pleasure
(33:35) How do we make comparisons across different animal species?
(33:41) Welfare ranges
(39:26) Sentience
(41:39) How do we compare improving welfare vs. averting lives?
(43:32) How do we make comparisons across time?
(46:23) Limitations of the framework
(48:25) A toy example: Trilobites and dodos
First published:
May 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fYNwTtdqzWttx6uvL/modelling-the-outcomes-of-animal-welfare-interventions-one
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This is a link post. ---
First published:
May 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nKDFKYJQBJ2xXhxvx/helen-toner-ex-openai-board-member-we-learned-about-chatgpt
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This is a link post. ---
First published:
May 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aTQmYafRSqe4xBkeH/jan-leike-i-m-excited-to-join-anthropicai-to-continue-the
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Summary.
After spending the past 5 years advising hundreds of consultants on how to optimize their career and donations for impact, seeding EA workplace groups within McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and beyond, and supporting 30+ career transitions, the EA Consulting Network is evolving into Consultants for Impact. We’re excited to continue helping high-impact teams and consulting talent to find each other!
About Consultants for Impact
Since 2019, Consultants for Impact (formerly the Effective Altruism Consulting Network) has been dedicated to supporting current, former, and prospective consultants in strategically optimizing the social impact of their careers.
We do this by:
- Prioritizing consultants who are highly committed to impact and are at career inflection points: We identify consultants who we believe are well-placed to have a high-impact career and support them with Career Conversations, introductions, retreats, and curated opportunities.
- Inspiring significant action by amplifying those who led by example: We emphasize [...]
Outline:
(00:40) About Consultants for Impact
(01:59) Why Focus on Consultants?
(03:37) Evolution to Consultants for Impact
(04:14) Our Programs
(06:20) Our Progress
(06:56) We’re Excited to Support You!
First published:
May 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zGxcDGjyerMeBC58y/ea-consulting-network-is-now-consultants-for-impact
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Open Phil's in-house legal team continues to keep an eye on the developments in the FTX bankruptcy case. Some resources we’ve put together for charities and other altruistic enterprises affected by the case can be found here.
Last week the FTX Examiner released the Examiner's Report. For context, on March 20 of this year, the FTX bankruptcy court appointed an independent examiner to review a wide swath of the various investigations into FTX and compile findings and make recommendations for additional investigations.
One notable finding that may be of interest to this audience is on page 165 of the Report (p. 180 of the pdf linked above). It reads:
S&C [1] provided to the Examiner a list of over 1,200 charitable donations made by the FTX Group. S&C initially prioritized recovery of the largest charitable donations before turning to the next-largest group of donations and, finally, working [...]
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hNKxHH9diFSAAa4cD/ftx-examiner-report
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Epistemic Status: somewhat confident: I may have made coding mistakes. R code is here if you feel like checking.
Introduction:
In their 2022 article, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Kahneman looked to reconcile the results from two of their papers. Kahneman (2010) had reported that above a certain income level ($75,000 USD), extra income had no association with increases in individual happiness. Killingsworth (2021) suggested that it did.
Kahneman and Killingsworth (henceforth KK) claimed they had resolved this conflict by (correctly) hypothesizing that:
1) There is an unhappy minority, whose unhappiness diminishes with rising income up to a threshold, then shows no further progress (i.e., Kahnemann's leveling off);
2) In the happier majority, happiness continues to rise with income even in the high range of incomes (i.e., Kllingsworth continued log-linear finding)
(More info on this discussion can be found in Spencer Greenberg's thoroughly enjoyable blog post. Spencer [...]
Outline:
(00:18) Introduction:
(03:04) Summary of Findings
(04:07) Results
(05:07) Median Regressions
(05:21) Figure 1
(06:16) Regressions at Various Percentiles
(06:55) Figure 2
(08:38) Implications
(10:50) Table 1: Happiness at Different Percentiles (above, KK; below, me)
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A5voYMFhPkWTrGkuJ/against-a-happiness-ceiling-replicating-killingsworth-and
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This payout report covers the EA Infrastructure Fund's grantmaking from June 16th 2023 to March 31st 2024 (9.5 months). It follows our previous June 2023 payout report.
- Total funding recommended: $1,697,882
- Total funding paid out[1]: $1,386,854
- Number of grants paid out: 41
- Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 49/173 = 28.3%
- Acceptance rate (including desk rejections): 18.4% (49/266)
- Report authors: Linchuan Zhang (primary author), Caleb Parikh (interim fund chair), Harri Bescelli, Tom Barnes
- Funding breakdown[2]
- EA Groups: $456,780 granted across 18 grants
- EA-related Groups: $312,304 granted across 6 grants
- EA Content: $78,216 granted across 3 grants
- EA Services and Infrastructure: $179,957 granted across 6 grants
- Effective Giving: $53,000 granted across 2 grants
- Research: $216,535 granted across 6 grants
8 of our grantees, who received a total of $521, 206, requested that our public reports for their grants are anonymized (they’re written below). 1 grantee, who received $2,500, requested that we do not [...]
Outline:
(02:32) Highlighted Grants
(16:32) Other Updates
(18:48) Other writings
(20:40) Appendix
(20:43) Other grants
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NiFTexNEnNoGShZr7/effective-altruism-infrastructure-fund-march-2024
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Ambitious Impact is hiring!
Ambitious Impact (AIM), formerly Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), runs training and incubation programs for high-impact career paths.
Recently, we have been scaling our work. AIM has developed new programs to support talented individuals in impactful careers beyond founding a charity. These include grantmaking, nonprofit research, and for-profit entrepreneurship. We are currently seeking a Talent and Recruitment Manager (or Director) to help us find and select the most talented people for these programs, helping outstanding individuals put their skills to better use for the world.
Talent identification, or vetting as we frequently refer to it within Ambitious Impact, has received little attention as a potentially highly impactful career. For the purposes of this article, we’re defining talent identification/vetting as work that takes a recruitment process from the point of application closure to the point of a job offer. This is separate from the marketing or communications [...]
Outline:
(01:32) Why great vetting matters
(03:34) What might make you a great fit for vetting
(05:56) Scaling impact and your career through vetting
(07:18) Interested in exploring talent identification further? Consider our open position!
First published:
May 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wXAdMCnx9FmkZDA4F/talent-identification-as-an-underappreciated-career-option
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Crossposted from AI Lab Watch. Subscribe on Substack.
Introduction.
Anthropic has an unconventional governance mechanism: an independent "Long-Term Benefit Trust" elects some of its board. Anthropic sometimes emphasizes that the Trust is an experiment, but mostly points to it to argue that Anthropic will be able to promote safety and benefit-sharing over profit.[1]
But the Trust's details have not been published and some information Anthropic has shared is concerning. In particular, Anthropic's stockholders can apparently overrule, modify, or abrogate the Trust, and the details are unclear.
Anthropic has not publicly demonstrated that the Trust would be able to actually do anything that stockholders don't like.
The facts
There are three sources of public information on the Trust:
- The Long-Term Benefit Trust (Anthropic 2023)
- Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust (Morley et al. 2023)
- The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn't destroy humanity (Vox: Matthews 2023)
They say there's [...]
Outline:
(00:53) The facts
(02:51) Conclusion
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JARcd9wKraDeuaFu5/maybe-anthropic-s-long-term-benefit-trust-is-powerless
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Summary.
I came across a program for curious young people called Leaf through an online course tailored about how to save and help lives, then attended a residential where I further explored these ideas. Going from being told there is a right or wrong way in my school system, I explored EA through the lens of learning techniques which I may or may not use to try to get closer to my goals- of helping others and saving lives. Through the adjacent opportunities such as books, talks, the 80k podcast, the network of people and the further online events, I have continued exploring the cause areas and have now changed my career progression plans.
IMPORTANT: this article was written based on my personal views, and with the motivation of documenting my personal journey but without any aim in terms of future involvement. Of course, please comment or contact [...]
Outline:
(02:06) How it started: a chance encounter with Leaf
(04:36) How to save 10 lives by age 20
(11:14) MY CAREER SHIFT: medicine to biomedical science
(16:48) The residential: Leaf 2023 Changemaker Fellowship
(17:54) EA, my thoughts
(19:58) So what did I take from Leaf
(21:44) NEGATIVES
(24:35) What next
First published:
May 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nmY6Xecrzsdv5WREK/being-a-young-person-in-ea-my-journey-into-the-ea-community
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Introduction.
First they came for the epistemology/we don’t know what happened after that.
I’m fairly antagonistic towards the author of that tweet, but it still resonates deep in my soul. Anything I want to do, anything I want to change, rests on having contact with reality. If I don’t have enough, I might as well be pushing buttons at random.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of forces pushing against having enough contact with reality. It's a lot of work even when reality cooperates, many situations are adversarial, and even when they’re not entropy itself will constantly chip away at your knowledge base.
This is why I think constantly seeking contact with reality is the meta principle without which all (consequentialist) principles are meaningless. If you aren’t actively pursuing truthseeking, you won’t have enough contact with reality to make having goals a reasonable concept, much less achieving them. [...]
Outline:
(01:30) Target audience
(01:54) A note on examples and actions
(03:21) Facets of truthseeking
(03:25) No gods, no monsters, no epistemic daddies
(05:24) Actions
(08:52) Seek and create information
(09:51) Actions
(10:29) Protect the epistemic commons
(16:19) Actions
(17:32) Open sharing of information
(20:09) Actions
(22:09) New truths are weird
(24:26) High Decoupling, Yet High Contextualizing
(26:16) Actions
(26:21) Willing to hurt people's feelings (but not more than necessary)
(28:33) Actions
(28:55) Conclusion
(29:26) Related Work
First published:
May 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XkLnbSsjK7TpNFgPn/truthseeking-is-the-ground-in-which-other-principles
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From my new blog: AI Lab Watch. All posts will be crossposted to LessWrong. Subscribe on Substack.
Many AI safety folks think that METR is close to the labs, with ongoing relationships that grant it access to models before they are deployed. This is incorrect. METR (then called ARC Evals) did pre-deployment evaluation for GPT-4 and Claude 2 in the first half of 2023, but it seems to have had no special access since then.[1] Other model evaluators also seem to have little access before deployment.
Clarification: there are many kinds of audits. This post is about model evals for dangerous capabilities. But I'm not aware of the labs using other kinds of audits to prevent extreme risks, excluding normal security/compliance audits.
Frontier AI labs' pre-deployment risk assessment should involve external model evals for dangerous capabilities.[2] External evals can improve a lab's risk assessment and—if the evaluator can publish [...]
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZPyhxiBqupZXLxLNd/ai-companies-aren-t-really-using-external-evaluators-1
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This is a link post. A brief overview of recent OpenAI departures (Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Daniel Kokotajlo, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Pavel Izmailov, William Saunders, Ryan Lowe Cullen O'Keefe[1]). Will add other relevant media pieces below as I come across them.
Some quotes perhaps worth highlighting:
Even when the team was functioning at full capacity, that “dedicated investment” was home to a tiny fraction of OpenAI's researchers and was promised only 20 percent of its computing power — perhaps the most important resource at an AI company. Now, that computing power may be siphoned off to other OpenAI teams, and it's unclear if there’ll be much focus on avoiding catastrophic risk from future AI models.
-Jan suggesting that compute for safety may have been deprioritised even despite the 20% commitment. (Wired claims that OpenAI confirms that their "superalignment team is no more").
“I joined with substantial hope that OpenAI [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 17th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ckYw5FZFrejETuyjN/articles-about-recent-openai-departures
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TL;DR It's time for an absurd challenge. On June 7th around 11:00, I'm going to (try to) break the world record for cycling without hands! 🚴🏻♂️ For more than 100km, I am raising money for the The Against Malaria Foundation (100% donated, costs covered by my company and myself) with the help of The Life You Can Save. Pledge your donation per kilometer or fixed amount here (tax deductibility possible in most countries, email me on vin@boas.co).
The full story
I'm Vin from Amsterdam, and I'm doing a world record attempt for cycling without hands for charity on the 7th of June. I am donating 100% to The Against Malaria Foundation, with the goal of saving at least one life (5.000 USD). You can participate and push me to go further by joining here.
It's going too far to say that my bike saved my life, but at [...]
First published:
May 20th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cj2Qauvc3tQRyXuBW/i-m-attempting-a-world-record-to-raise-money-for-amf
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How well do you know the details of the Giving What We Can Pledge? A surprising number of people we’ve spoken to — including many who know a lot about effective giving — shared some or all of these pledge misconceptions.
Misconception #1: If you sign the pledge, you have to donate at least 10% of your income each year.
The Giving What We Can Pledge is a public commitment to donate at least 10% of your lifetime income to the organisations that can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others. Giving 10% of your income each year is a good rule of thumb for most people, as it helps them stay on track with their lifetime pledge. However, there are certainly cases where it doesn’t make sense to give annually. Provided you continue reporting your income[1] on your personal pledge dashboard, the “Overall Progress” bar [...]
Outline:
(00:20) Misconception #1: If you sign the pledge, you have to donate at least 10% of your income each year.
(02:18) Misconception #2: Only the charities on the Giving What We Can Platform count towards your pledge
(03:25) Misconception #3: The pledge is a legal document
(04:43) Misconception #4: There's no good reason to sign the pledge if you’re already donating 10% or more
(09:22) Misconception #5: There's only one pledge
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y5QKkt9PFhqvG7CEn/5-things-you-ve-got-wrong-about-the-giving-what-we-can
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I. Introduction and a prima facie case
It seems to me that most (perhaps all) effective altruists believe that:
- The global economy's current mode of allocating resources is suboptimal. (Otherwise, why would effective altruism be necessary?)
- Individuals and institutions can be motivated to change their behaviour for the better on the basis of concern for others. (Otherwise, how could effective altruism be possible?)
(1) suggests that we should explore alternative ways of allocating resources. (2) suggests that alternatives involving more altruistic motivation, and less of the self-interested motivation that dominates our current mode of resource allocation, could be both feasible and superior. There is an old name for the movement and ideal associated with pursuing an economic system based on more altruistic motives: socialism.[1] This is a prima facie case for EAs to engage with socialist thought and politics. However, I see little of this kind of engagement.[2] [...]
First published:
May 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gm2ggniHqqiNBWWiq/why-not-socialism
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(Cross-posted from http://www.tobyord.com/writing/robust-longterm-comparisons )
The choice of discount rate is crucially important when comparing options that could affect our entire future. Except when it isn’t. Can we tease out a class of comparisons that everyone can agree on regardless of their views on discounting?
Some of the actions we can take today may have longterm effects — permanent changes to humanity's longterm trajectory. For example, we may take risks that could lead to human extinction. Or we might irreversibly destroy parts of our environment, creating permanent reductions in the quality of life.
Evaluating and comparing such effects is usually extremely sensitive to what economists call the pure rate of time preference, denoted ρ. This is a way of encapsulating how much less we should value a benefit simply because it occurs at a later time. There are other components of the overall discount rate that adjust for the fact [...]
First published:
May 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hh7bgsDzP6rKZ5bbW/robust-longterm-comparisons
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This is a link post. Extended version of a short paper accepted at DPFM, ICLR'24. Authored by Vishaal Udandarao, Ameya Prabhu, Adhiraj Ghosh, Yash Sharma, Philip H.S. Torr, Adel Bibi, Samuel Albanie, and Matthias Bethge.
Abstract:
Web-crawled pretraining datasets underlie the impressive "zero-shot" evaluation performance of multimodal models, such as CLIP for classification/retrieval and Stable-Diffusion for image generation. However, it is unclear how meaningful the notion of "zero-shot" generalization is for such multimodal models, as it is not known to what extent their pretraining datasets encompass the downstream concepts targeted for during "zero-shot" evaluation. In this work, we ask: How is the performance of multimodal models on downstream concepts influenced by the frequency of these concepts in their pretraining datasets? We comprehensively investigate this question across 34 models and five standard pretraining datasets (CC-3M, CC-12M, YFCC-15M, LAION-400M, LAION-Aesthetics), generating over 300GB of data artifacts. We consistently find that, far from [...]
First published:
May 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SmYziwNbmMZYMvyGr/no-zero-shot-without-exponential-data-pretraining-concept
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This article is the first in a series I plan to publish on different aspects of AI Safety group strategy. The aim is that, eventually, these articles will form the basis for a new resource center for AI Safety Groups. Note that these articles aren’t being published in any particular order.
TL;DR: AI safety groups should carefully consider their branding strategy to attract target audiences and avoid silently losing talented individuals by giving the wrong impressions. Key things to do are identifying audience profiles, tailoring the value proposition and differentiating your group from others. Common branding strategies (technical, institutional, impact, or broad appeal) each have tradeoffs to weigh based on your goals and your context. Regularly seek feedback to refine branding rather than relying solely on intuition.
Introduction.
In some ways, it's still the early days of AI Safety groups. Groups, whether they’re at universities, entire cities, or [...]
Outline:
(01:59) Why branding matters
(03:00) What failure looks like
(05:09) Defining your strategy
(07:18) Some high-level strategies
(12:04) Conclusion
(12:28) Annex: Some practical tips on websites
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Loagie97ahHiog2P7/branding-ai-safety-groups-a-field-guide
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TLDR: Asking for hires to be acquainted with EA ideas or to demonstrate how EA they are limits the talent pool where it is already scarce. Looking outside of EA has challenges but can be a net positive in some circumstances.
Intro
Throughout my involvement in the EA world, I see that one of the biggest challenges facing effective altruism is attracting the right people with the right skills to execute its many promising projects. I've witnessed firsthand in my work in both China and Serbia how a lack of skilled personnel can hinder an organization's progress.
Take EA Serbia as an example. As the EA movement is relatively new in Serbia, it's been hard to attract members and move them inward through the concentric circles. We decided to hire two part-time employees (one focused on marketing & social media, the second focused on outreach and developing external relations) [...]
Outline:
(00:24) Intro
(03:15) Key Takeaways
(03:19) Pros:
(03:22) Expertise is important, and it gets things done:
(05:01) “Culture fit” assimilation:
(05:38) Industry specific wisdom:
(06:45) Cons:
(06:48) Risk to team cohesion:
(07:39) Slow development:
(08:32) EA jobs provide scarce non-monetary goods:
(09:02) Conclusion
First published:
May 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/guz3f6bvvRNAfQo7B/hiring-non-ea-talent-pros-and-cons
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Caspar Oesterheld came up with two of the most important concepts in my field of work: Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds and Safe Pareto Improvements. He also came up with a potential implementation of evidential decision theory in boundedly rational agents called decision auctions, wrote a comprehensive review of anthropics and how it interacts with decision theory which most of my anthropics discussions built on, and independently decided to work on AI some time late 2009 or early 2010.
Needless to say, I have a lot of respect for Caspar's work. I’ve often felt very confused about what to do in my attempts at conceptual research, so I decided to ask Caspar how he did his research. Below is my writeup from the resulting conversation.
How Caspar came up with surrogate goals
The process
- Caspar had spent six months FTE thinking about a specific bargaining problem [...]
Outline:
(00:54) How Caspar came up with surrogate goals
(00:59) The process
(02:44) Caspar's reflections on what was important during the process
(04:33) How Caspar came up with ECL
(04:38) The process
(07:01) Caspar's reflections on what was important during the process
(07:24) How Caspar came up with decision auctions
(07:29) The process
(09:44) How Caspar decided to work on superhuman AI in late 2009 or early 2010
(10:24) The process
(13:09) Caspar's reflections on what was important during the process
(14:30) General notes on his approach to research
(14:34) What does research concretely look like in his case?
(15:16) Research immersion
(16:36) Goal orientation vs. curiosity orientation
First published:
May 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BKLgH56b8WCQ3gfkf/how-to-do-conceptual-research-case-study-interview-with
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We’re excited to announce a new volunteer-run organisation, UK Voters For Animals, dedicated to mobilising UK voters to win key legislative changes for farmed animals. Our goal is to recruit and train voters to meet with MPs and prospective MPs to build political support for our key asks. Due to the upcoming general election, we think this is a crucial time to apply pressure on politicians.
If you want to use your political power to win change for farmed animals, sign up to get involved here. Please share with anyone who may be interested – we’re looking to find people in all 650 constituencies around the UK so no small feat!
We think people in the EA community would be a great fit for helping out with this work because they are often thoughtful, pragmatic, and impact-focused. The minimum commitment required is attending a training, and participating in [...]
First published:
May 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BmWuycesbhnXhmy5D/announcing-uk-voters-for-animals
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This is a link post. Here's the funding gap that gets me the most emotionally worked up:
In 2020, the largest philanthropic funder of nuclear security, the MacArthur Foundation, withdrew from the field, reducing total annual funding from $50m to $30m.
That means people who’ve spent decades building experience in the field will no longer be able to find jobs.
And $30m a year of philanthropic funding for nuclear security philanthropy is tiny on conventional terms. (In fact, the budget of Oppenheimer was $100m, so a single movie cost more than 3x annual funding to non-profit policy efforts to reduce nuclear war.)
And even other neglected EA causes, like factory farming, catastrophic biorisks and AI safety, these days receive hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic funding, so at least on this dimension, nuclear security is even more neglected.
I agree that a full accounting of neglectedness should [...]
First published:
May 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mEkJjdpg8sespKwNZ/nuclear-security-seems-like-an-interesting-funding-gap
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This is a link post. Animal advocates are driven by a common belief: animals should not suffer. Quantifying suffering involves considering the duration and intensity of animals’ pain. This nuanced approach reveals that focusing solely on the number of animals killed can obscure the true extent of their suffering. Welfare improvements and reducing the number of farmed animals both contribute to decreasing total suffering, each addressing different aspects of the problem. By delving deeper into the complexities of animal suffering, we can better advocate for meaningful change.
Summary.
- Animal activists have various motivations to help animals, but the majority of them agree that animals should not suffer.
- Suffering is difficult to measure and define, but it is important to try to do so, as it allows us to prioritize which animals need the most help. One approach is to define different intensities of suffering (excruciating, disabling, hurtful, and [...]
Outline:
(02:00) The challenge of understanding the scope of animal suffering
(04:32) Can suffering even be measured?
(07:31) Deciding which species to help: looking beyond the number of animals killed
(07:38) The prioritization problem
(08:31) Estimating the total time animals spend in farms
(11:55) Example: comparing the numbers of farmed animals of different species alive in France
(13:42) Estimating the average intensity of suffering
(17:08) Conclusion about the prioritization problem
(18:04) Underestimating how much welfare improvements help animals
(18:10) In terms of reducing suffering, welfare improvements can be the same thing as reducing the number of animals farmed
(20:01) But are welfare reforms effective at reducing suffering?
(21:43) Conclusion
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3iahMrFDf5DfRWyHa/fighting-animal-suffering-beyond-the-number-of-animals
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This is a link post. This is the first in a sequence of four posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Introduction.
In the United States, environmentalism is extremely partisan.
It might feel like this was inevitable. Caring about the environment, and supporting government action to protect the environment, might seem like they are inherently left-leaning. Partisanship has increased for many issues, so it might not be surprising that environmentalism became partisan too.
Looking at the public opinion polls more closely makes it more surprising. Environmentalism in the United States is unusually partisan, compared to other issues, compared to other countries, and compared to the United States itself at other times.
The partisanship of environmentalism was not inevitable.
Compared to Other Issues
Environmentalism is one of the, if not the, most partisan issues in the US.
The most recent data demonstrating this comes [...]
Outline:
(01:02) Compared to Other Issues
(03:56) Compared to Other Countries
(05:30) Compared to Other Times
(07:53) Conclusion
The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6a7vGLHQujNfZuZjm/environmentalism-in-the-united-states-is-unusually-partisan
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We are thrilled to introduce nine new charities launched through our February-March 2024 Incubation Program. This is an AIM record with an average of five charities launched per round in the previous years. We are also proud to announce that thanks to very generous donors from the Seed Network Funding Circle, these new organizations have secured over $1 million in funding! This is a significant milestone for AIM as an organization. We are very grateful for the support of our funders, mentors, and, most of all, the talented applicants who decided to pursue entrepreneurial careers in the nonprofit sector.
We are committed to ongoing support for these new initiatives through mentorship, operational assistance, free co-working space in London, and access to an ever-expanding entrepreneurial network of funders, advisors, interns, and fellow charity founders.
This article provides a brief introduction to our new organizations. You will find more information [...]
Outline:
(02:25) Centre for Aquaculture Progress
(06:01) Notify Health
(09:53) Learning Alliance
(15:06) Novah
(20:11) Access to Medicines Initiative (AMI)
(23:59) FarmKind
(28:40) Ark Philanthropy
First published:
May 14th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tDQm4Z5aQytRE2RKn/presenting-nine-new-charities-a-record-for-the-aim-ce
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This is a link post. "The new influence web is pushing the argument that AI is less an existential danger than a crucial business opportunity, and arguing that strict safety rules would hand America's AI edge to China. It has already caused key lawmakers to back off some of their more worried rhetoric about the technology.
... The effort, a loosely coordinated campaign led by tech giants IBM and Meta, includes wealthy new players in the AI lobbying space such as top chipmaker Nvidia, as well as smaller AI startups, the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and libertarian billionaire Charles Koch.
... Last year, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) declared himself “freaked out” by cutting-edge AI systems, also known as frontier models, and called for regulation to ward off several scary scenarios. Today, Lieu co-chairs the House AI Task Force and says he's unconvinced by claims that Congress must [...]
First published:
May 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QBCHcqZ8mCqfdtARn/in-dc-a-new-wave-of-ai-lobbyists-gains-the-upper-hand
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High Impact Professionals is excited to announce that applications are now open for the Summer 2024 round of our Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). The IAP is a 6-week program designed to equip experienced EA-aligned professionals (not currently working at an EA organization) with the knowledge and tools necessary to make a meaningful impact and empower them to start taking actionable steps right away.
To date, the program has been a success, with several alumni having already changed careers to new impactful roles and nearly all participants planning to do the same in the next ~6 months. IAP alumni are also volunteering an average of ~100 hours at EA-aligned orgs/projects and donating on average more than 7% of their annual salary to effective charities. We are currently running the Spring 2024 round, which features a larger number of participants and cohorts.
We’re pleased to open up this new Summer [...]
Outline:
(01:13) Program Objectives
(01:43) Program Overview
(03:48) Why Should You Apply?
(04:57) Who Should Apply?
First published:
May 10th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rm2GeCZ5BfqGDxZ9W/impact-accelerator-program-for-ea-professionals-2
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Open Philanthropy[1] recently shared a blog post with a list of some cool things accomplished in 2023 by grantees of their Global Health and Wellbeing (GHW) programs (including farm animal welfare). The post “aims to highlight just a few updates on what our grantees accomplished in 2023, to showcase their impact and make [OP's] work a little more tangible.”
I'm link-posting because I found it valuable to read about these projects, several of which I hadn’t heard of. And I like that despite its brevity, the post manages to include a lot of relevant information (and links), along with explanations of the key relevant theories of change and opportunity.
For people who don’t want to click through to the post itself, I’m including an overview of what's included and a selection of excerpts below.
Open Philanthropy's current Global Health and Wellbeing focus areas — images taken from here. Overview
[...]
Outline:
(01:04) Overview
(02:25) Examples/excerpts from the post
(02:40) 1.1 Dr. Sachchida Tripathi (air quality sensors)
(04:27) 2.2. SAVAC (accelerating the development and implementation of strep A vaccines)
(05:58) 3.2 Dr. Allan Basbaum (pain research)
(07:29) 5.1 Institute for Progress
(08:35) 6.1 Open Wing Alliance
(09:57) 6.2 Aquaculture Stewardship Council
(10:57) Quick closing thoughts (from myself)
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bL5qWoyMf42ANtBdX/cool-things-our-ghw-grantees-have-done-in-2023-open
Linkpost URL:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cool-things-our-grantees-have-done-in-2023/
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This article contains more than 100 uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description.
First published:
May 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cbgT2JTckTc8d7yGs/notes-on-risk-compensation
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Co-Authors: @Rocket, @Ryan Kidd, @LauraVaughan, @McKennaFitzgerald, @Christian Smith, @Juan Gil, @Henry Sleight
The ML Alignment & Theory Scholars program (MATS) is an education and research mentorship program for researchers entering the field of AI safety. This winter, we held the fifth iteration of the MATS program, in which 63 scholars received mentorship from 20 research mentors. In this post, we motivate and explain the elements of the program, evaluate our impact, and identify areas for improving future programs.
Summary.
Key details about the Winter Program:
- The four main changes we made after our Summer program were:
- Reducing our scholar stipend from $40/h to $30/h based on alumni feedback;
- Transitioning Scholar Support to Research Management;
- Using the full Lighthaven campus for office space as well as housing;
- Replacing Alignment 201 with AI Strategy Discussions.
- Educational attainment of MATS scholars:
- 48% of scholars were pursuing a bachelor's degree, master's [...]
Outline:
(06:49) Theory of Change
(08:40) Winter Program Overview
(08:44) Schedule
(09:42) Mentor Selection
(09:46) Approach
(12:56) Scholar Allocation
(13:51) Winter Mentor Portfolio
(15:00) Mentors’ Counterfactual Winters
(15:26) Other Mentorship Programs
(15:58) Scholar Selection
(18:56) Educational Attainment of Scholars
(19:37) Scholars’ Counterfactual Winters
(21:03) Engineering Tests
(22:49) Stipends
(25:59) Mentor Suggestions
(28:04) Neel Nanda's Training Phase (Nov 20-Dec 22)
(30:02) Research Phase Elements (Jan 8-Mar 15)
(30:43) Mentorship
(32:43) Research Management
(38:32) Seminars and Workshops
(39:35) Milestone Assignments
(41:56) Lighthaven Office
(42:35) Strategy Discussions
(45:04) Networking Events
(46:27) Social Events
(47:00) Community Health
(49:23) Extension Phase (Apr 1 - Jul 19)
(51:29) Winter Program Evaluation
(51:43) Evaluating Program Elements
(52:38) Overall Program
(53:29) Mentorship
(57:10) Research Management
(01:10:54) Seminars and Workshops
(01:12:01) Lighthaven Office
(01:15:33) Strategy Discussions
(01:17:17) Networking Events
(01:20:06) Community Health
(01:23:05) Evaluating Key Scholar Outcomes
(01:23:10) Scholar Self-Reports
(01:26:26) Mentor Evaluations
(01:28:28) Milestone Assignments
(01:30:19) Funding and Other Career Obstacles
(01:34:19) Evaluating Key Mentor Outcomes
(01:34:24) Self-Reported Benefits
(01:35:14) Biggest Impact
(01:37:31) Testimonials
(01:39:38) Improved Mentor Abilities
(01:40:00) Lessons and Changes for Future Programs
(01:40:05) Advisory Board for Mentorship Selection
(01:40:32) Fewer Mechanistic Interpretability Mentors
(01:41:05) More AI Governance Mentors
(01:42:09) Pre-Screening with CodeSignal
(01:42:32) Research Manager Hiring
(01:42:56) Modified Discussion Groups
(01:43:32) Acknowledgements
The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Cz4tE2zwcwwakqBo8/mats-winter-2023-24-retrospective
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Animal Ethics has recently launched Senti, an Ethical AI assistant designed to answer questions related to animal ethics, wild animal suffering, and longtermism. We at Animal Ethics believe that while AI technologies could potentially pose significant risks to animals, they could benefit all sentient beings if used responsibly. For example, Animal advocates can leverage AI to amplify our message and improve our approach to share information about Animal Ethics with a wider audience.
There is a lack of knowledge today not just among the general public, but also among people sympathetic to nonhuman animals, about the basic concepts and arguments underpinning the critique of speciesism, animal exploitation, concern for wild animal suffering, and future sentient beings. Many of the ideas are unintuitive as well, so it helps people to be able to chat and ask followup questions in order to cement their understanding. We hope this tool will [...]
First published:
May 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/prQkGagzHRjBskemd/introducing-senti-animal-ethics-ai-assistant
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Tl;dr:
- Leaf supports exceptional teenagers to explore how they can do the most good.
- We’ve run 3 residential programmes and 4 different types of online fellowship: general to having high positive impact, focused on university decision-making, cause-specific, and subject-specific.
- I’m excited about the online programmes (especially subject-specific) as being cost-effective and highly scalable.
- I plan to actually scale these! You might be able to help through:
- Advising Leaf
- Being a facilitator or guest speaker
- Working for Leaf later this year
- Funding Leaf
- There are lots of other mini insights and updates, summarised below.
I wrote this post quickly, adapting from an existing internal doc, so that I could do an ‘80:20’ version of sharing insights. Please message me if you’d like access to the original doc with lots more detail (it's 50 pages, mostly of summary tables of metrics I track), evidence, and reasoning transparency. Please briefly explain who [...]
Outline:
(01:22) Background on Leaf
(02:34) Programmes summary
(02:39) Leaf's next steps
(04:34) How you can help
First published:
May 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/97gdBoofgmmxsHaai/lessons-from-two-years-of-talent-search-pilots
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TL;DR: This is a written version of a talk given at EAG Bay Area 2023. It claims university EA community building can be incredibly impactful, but there are important pitfalls to avoid, such as being overly zealous, overly open, or overly exclusionary. These pitfalls can turn away talented people and create epistemic issues in the group. By understanding these failure modes, focusing on truth-seeking discussions, and being intentional about group culture, university groups can expose promising students to important ideas and help them flourish.
Introduction.
Community building at universities can be incredibly impactful, but important pitfalls can make this work less effective or even net negative. These pitfalls can turn off the kind of talented people that we want in the EA community, and it's challenging to tell if you're falling into them. This post is based on a talk I gave at EAG Bay Area in [...]
Outline:
(02:12) Why University Community Building Can Be Impactful
(03:03) Common Pitfalls in University Group Organizing
(03:26) Pitfall 1: Being Overly Zealous
(05:06) Pitfall 2: Being Overly Open
(06:41) Pitfall 3: Being Overly Exclusionary
(08:09) Other Pitfalls
(08:33) These Pitfalls are Sneaky
(09:04) Checking Your Blind Spots
(10:34) An Aspirational Vision
(11:45) Ways I Could Be Wrong
(12:32) Conclusion
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vHZb7PvGstmsCD4Ni/potential-pitfalls-in-university-ea-community-building
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Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) produced this report because we believe it could have significant informational value to the movement, rather than because we anticipate SWP directly working on a shrimp paste intervention in the future. We think a new project focused on shrimp paste could potentially be very high impact and would be excited to collaborate with organizations working in this space.
This report was written by Alethea Faye Cendaña and Trinh Lien-Huong, with feedback provided by Shannon Davis, Aaron Boddy, Michael St Jules, Ren Ryba, and Zuzana Šperlová. We are grateful to all the stakeholders who took the time to offer their thoughts for this study. We would like to thank the external reviewers for their valuable insights and contributions. All errors and shortcomings are our own.
Executive Summary
Acetes shrimps are among the most — if not the most — utilized species for food globally. Harvested from [...]
Outline:
(00:54) Executive Summary
(05:57) Global overview of the shrimp paste industry
(06:29) Use
(08:25) Production
(11:23) Supply chain
(11:27) Small producing communities
(12:48) Equipment used
(13:25) Shrimp paste manufacturers
(14:18) Issues in the industry
(17:23) Welfare issues
(17:34) Capture and retrieval
(18:32) Processing
(20:10) Vietnam Case Study
(21:22) Industry overview
(24:21) Interview with a fisherwoman from Thanh Hoa
(26:18) Large company processors
(27:26) Challenges
(30:42) Opportunities for intervention
(30:54) In the supply chain
(31:53) Shrimp paste alternatives
(33:22) Raising Consumer Awareness
(33:50) Remaining research questions
(34:11) Acetes shrimp sentience and welfare
(34:27) Shrimp paste industry
(35:13) Fisher communities
First published:
May 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RTdsvfYTZrJLGFQZc/shrimp-paste-and-animal-welfare
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Once it finishes selling all of its assets, the company will have as much as $16.3 billion in cash to distribute, according to a company statement. It owes customers and other non-governmental creditors about $11 billion.
Depending on the type of claim they hold in the case, some creditors could recover as much as 142% of what they are owed. The vast majority of customers, however, will likely get paid 118% of what they had on the FTX platform the day the company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Earlier this year, the company had about $6.4 billion in cash. The increase is due mostly to a general spike in prices for various cryptocurrencies, including Solana, a token heavily backed by convicted fraudster and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. The company has also sold dozens other assets, including various venture-capital projects like a stake in the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic.
First published:
May 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/afi6xgEmydcCLLcBF/ftx-has-billions-more-than-needed-to-pay-bankruptcy-victims
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Last month, we made an April Fools Day post about rebranding to Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy. It was a two-sided joke, because we are rebranding.
As of today, Impactful Animal Advocacy is now Hive.
Our new name won’t have the word “impactful” in it – but it's still an important part of our mission: to end factory farming through creating impact-focused communities.
We are excited to announce that Impactful Animal Advocacy is now Hive, the same organization with a fresh look and feel.
After much thought and consideration, we envision Hive to better reflect who we are – capturing our collaborative spirit and commitment to generating impact within the farmed animal advocacy movement.
Why rebrand?
This change is, in part, a response to common feedback that the name Impactful Animal Advocacy is too long (10 syllabus!), hard to remember, and difficult to recognize as [...]
Outline:
(00:57) Why rebrand?
(01:25) Why we chose Hive
(02:31) How this change affects our community or programs
First published:
May 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5qk6wb93mpGaKxSQk/introducing-hive-a-rebrand-for-impactful-animal-advocacy
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Last month, we made an April Fools Day post about rebranding to Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy. It was a two-sided joke, because we are rebranding.
As of today, Impactful Animal Advocacy is now Hive.
Our new name won’t have the word “impactful” in it – but it's still an important part of our mission: to end factory farming through creating impact-focused communities.
We are excited to announce that Impactful Animal Advocacy is now Hive, the same organization with a fresh look and feel.
After much thought and consideration, we envision Hive to better reflect who we are – capturing our collaborative spirit and commitment to generating impact within the farmed animal advocacy movement.
Why rebrand?
This change is, in part, a response to common feedback that the name Impactful Animal Advocacy is too long (10 syllabus!), hard to remember, and difficult to recognize as [...]
Outline:
(00:57) Why rebrand?
(01:25) Why we chose Hive
(02:31) How this change affects our community or programs
First published:
May 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5qk6wb93mpGaKxSQk/introducing-hive-a-rebrand-for-impactful-animal-advocacy
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The net welfare effects of fishing, changes to fishing pressure and demand for wild-caught aquatic animals on wild aquatic animals seem highly morally ambiguous, in large part because there are1. tradeoffs between species due to predation, e.g. larger (respectively smaller) populations and life expectancies for one species results in smaller (respectively larger) populations and life expectancies for their prey and competitors, and this cascades down the food chain, 2. uncertainty about moral weight tradeoffs between affected species, and 3. depending on the moral view, uncertainty about whether the directly and indirectly affected animals have good or bad lives on average.
Illustration of a marine food web by ChatGPT/DALL·E Acknowledgements
Thanks to Brian Tomasik, Ren Ryba and Tori for their feedback on an earlier draft. All errors are my own.
For prior related writing that is more comprehensive and suffering-focused, see Tomasik, 2015–2017. This piece focuses on population effects, overlapping largely with Tomasik [...]
Outline:
(01:00) Acknowledgements
(01:25) Population effects and welfare uncertainty
The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oms5N5K5HxL2KJcmb/the-moral-ambiguity-of-fishing-on-wild-aquatic-animal
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I saw this post from Doing Westminster Better and wanted to blast it widely for people to take action today as it seems like a great opportunity, and a great ratio of effort to expected impact.
Defra — the UK's department for the environment and, in some sense, the ministry that affects more lives than any other, as the body which regulates the farming of over a billion farmed animals in England — is currently considering the most impactful animal welfare regulation in years. This is your last day to tell the government that you care about animals and support this regulation.
Here's what you need to know: the government is considering introduce animal welfare labeling. This would support consumers who still eat meat to make better informed choices about the animals they eat, whether that means helping you find the higher welfare product, or nudging you [...]
First published:
May 7th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yGok5TojYh9zHw7Zb/an-impactful-opportunity-to-take-action-for-animals-by-today
Linkpost URL:
https://open.substack.com/pub/doingwestminsterbetter/p/you-have-24-hours-to-tell-the-government
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We’re excited to share a new addition to our site: an impact-focused job board!
We’ve considered launching a job board for some time, so we’re happy to add this feature to the Probably Good site. The job board aims to:
- Help people find more promising job opportunities, including in cause areas that aren’t as thoroughly covered by other impact-focused boards such as 80,000 Hours and Animal Advocacy Careers.
- Direct our audience to concrete opportunities that meet a high standard of impact.
- Reduce friction for people on our site to take the first step towards a career change, by providing opportunities to apply for or just exposing them to new options.
As Animal Advocacy Careers have highlighted before, job boards are often the primary gateway to career advice sites, and so we hope the job board will also extend our content's reach and general impact.
Why we’re launching a job [...]
Outline:
(00:59) Why we’re launching a job board
(02:34) How you can help
(03:09) Final Notes
First published:
May 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZPB87ayzzwAoxycvN/probably-good-launched-a-new-job-board
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Latest Draft Here
Abstract.
Here, I present GDP (per capita) forecasts of major economies until 2050. Since GDP per capita is the best generalized predictor of many important variables, such as welfare, GDP forecasts can give us a more concrete picture of what the world might look like in just 27 years. The key claim here is: even if AI does not cause transformative growth, our business-as-usual near-future is still surprisingly different from today.
Results
In recent history, we've seen unprecedented economic growth and rises in living standards.
Consider this graph:[1]
How will living standards improve as GDP per capita (GDP/cap) rises? Here, I show data that projects GDP/cap until 2050. Forecasting GDP per capita is a crucial undertaking as it strongly correlates with welfare indicators like consumption, leisure, inequality, and mortality. These forecasts make the future more concrete and give us a better sense [...]
Outline:
(00:39) Results
(02:45) Discussion
(05:40) Values and Culture
(09:01) Growth could be much faster
(11:49) Implications for AI
(16:57) Will growth slow?
(19:56) Methods
(22:05) Persistence of growth
(23:26) Future Research
(29:05) Appendix: Further reading
(29:09) The World in 2050
(30:55) Economics
(30:59) GDP as a proxy for welfare
(31:03) AI
(36:32) Forecasting
(36:35) Fiction
(36:38) Appendix: Causal Model Between Growth, Liberal Democracy, Human Capital, Peace, and X-Risk
(36:59) Economic Growth causes…
(37:47) Democracy causes...
(40:02) Human capital causes…
(40:44) Peace and stability causes...
The original text contained 79 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
May 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ubZjxQocGqeZJJXE9/gdp-per-capita-in-2050
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We can use Nvidia's stock price to estimate market expectations for the size of the AI chip market, and we can use that to back-out expectations about AI software revenues and value creation.
This helps to understand how much AI growth is expected by society, and how EA expectations compare. It's similar to an earlier post that uses interest rates in a similar way, except I'd argue using the prices of AI companies is more useful right now, since it's more targeted at the figures we most care about.
The full analysis is here, but here are some key points:
- Nvidia's current market cap implies the future AI chip market reaches over ~$180bn/year, then grows at average rates after that (so around $200bn by 2027).
- For a data centre to actually use these chips in servers costs another ~80% for other hardware and electricity, then the AI software [...]
First published:
May 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dw8Wxcwc7TuSR2Tb9/the-market-expects-ai-software-to-create-trillions-of
Linkpost URL:
https://benjamintodd.substack.com/p/the-market-expects-ai-software-to
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Around the end of Feb 2024 I attended the Summit on Existential Risk and EAG: Bay Area (GCRs), during which I did 25+ one-on-ones about the needs and gaps in the EA-adjacent catastrophic risk landscape, and how they’ve changed.
The meetings were mostly with senior managers or researchers in the field who I think are worth listening to (unfortunately I can’t share names). Below is how I’d summarise the main themes in what was said.
If you have different impressions of the landscape, I’d be keen to hear them.
- There's been a big increase in the number of people working on AI safety, partly driven by a reallocation of effort (e.g. Rethink Priorities starting an AI policy think tank); and partly driven by new people entering the field after its newfound prominence.
- Allocation in the landscape seems more efficient than in the past – it's harder to identify [...]
First published:
May 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YDjH6ACPZq889tqeJ/updates-on-the-ea-catastrophic-risk-landscape
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
An article in Vox yesterday by Kelsey Piper notes that after suffering through the whole Covid pandemic, policymakers and publics now seem remarkably unconcerned to prevent another one. ‘Repeated efforts to get a serious pandemic prevention program through [the US] Congress', she notes, ‘have fizzled.’ Writing from Britain, I'm not aware of more serious efforts to prevent a repetition over here.
This seems surprising. Both governments and citizens notoriously neglect many catastrophic threats, sometimes because they’ve never yet materialised (thermonuclear war; misaligned superintelligence), sometimes because they creep up on us slowly (climate change, biodiversity loss), sometimes because it's been a while since the last disaster and memories fade. After an earthquake or a hundred-year flood, more people take out insurance against them; over time, memories fade and take-up declines.
None of these mechanisms plausibly explains apathy toward pandemic risk. If anything, you’d think people would exaggerate the threat [...]
First published:
May 4th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/prmfHaBDCZtBqZeW9/pandemic-apathy
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A while back, I wrote a quicktake about how the Belgian Senate voted to enshrine animal welfare in the Constitution.
It's been a journey. I work for GAIA, a Belgian animal advocacy group that for years has tried to get animal welfare added to the constitution. Today we were present as a supermajority of the senate came out in favor of our proposed constitutional amendment. [...]
It's a very good day for Belgian animals but I do want to note that:
- This does not mean an effective shutdown of the meat industry, merely that all future pro-animal welfare laws and lawsuits will have an easier time. And,
- It still needs to pass the Chamber of Representatives.
If there's interest I will make a full post about it if once it passes the Chamber.
It is now my great pleasure to announce to you that a supermajority of [...]
Outline:
(02:55) Legal importance
(04:10) GAIAs experience with the ban on unanesthetized slaughter
(05:46) Belgian animal welfare law
(07:20) Political analysis
(07:46) Political parties
(10:05) How the parties voted
(11:18) Far-right animal welfare politics
First published:
May 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ybwGmzmXwPguxFgkt/animal-welfare-is-now-enshrined-in-the-belgian-constitution
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I am dealing with repetitive strain injury and don’t foresee being able to really respond to any comments.
I’m a little hesitant to post this, but I thought I should be vulnerable. Honestly, I'm relieved that I finally get to share my voice. I know some people may want me to discuss this privately – but that might not be helpful to me, as I know some issues have been tried to be silenced by the very people who were meant to help. And to be honest, the fear of criticizing EA is something I have disliked about EA – I’ve been behind the scenes enough to know that despite being well-intentioned, criticizing EA (especially openly) can privately get you excluded from opportunities and circles, often even silently. This is an internal battle I’ve had with EA for a while (years). Still, I thought by sharing my experiences I [...]
Outline:
(00:55) Appreciation and disillusionment
(03:30) Specific challenges
(03:33) When it has been uncomfortable for diversity and inclusion
(04:33) When it primarily became about prestige or funding
(07:13) When professional social dynamics were unhealthy
(09:46) When empathy is deprioritized and logic/consequentialism/utilitarianism becomes toxic
(13:38) Parting ways
First published:
May 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3GjstAyhH9cDeNar4/my-lament-to-ea
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I was interviewed in yesterday's 80,000 hours podcast: Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives. As I say in the podcast, there's good evidence that this is a cost-effective way to save lives. Many peer-reviewed articles show that Kangaroo Mother Care is effective. The 80k link has many further links to the articles and data behind the podcast. You can see GiveWell's write up of their support for our project at this link.
This partnership with a large government medical college is able to reach many babies. And with more funding, we could achieve more. Anyone can support this project by donating, at riceinstitute.org, to a 501(c)3 public charity.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask below!
First published:
May 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rwq8WqcQ9hxjxPmud/ask-me-questions-here-about-my-80-000-hours-podcast-on
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a cross-post and you can see the original here, written in 2022. I am not the original author, but I thought it was good for more EAs to know about this.
I am posting anonymously for obvious reasons, but I am a longstanding EA who is concerned about Torres's effects on our community.
An incomplete summary
Introduction.
This post compiles evidence that Émile P. Torres, a philosophy student at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany, has a long pattern of concerning behavior, which includes gross distortion and falsification, persistent harassment, and the creation of fake identities.
Note: Since Torres has recently claimed that they have been the target of threats from anonymous accounts, I would like to state that I condemn any threatening behavior in the strongest terms possible, and that I have never contacted Torres or posted anything about Torres other than in this Substack [...]
Outline:
(00:25) An incomplete summary
(01:16) Stalking and harassment
(01:20) Peter Boghossian
(11:48) Helen Pluckrose
(19:02) Demonstrable falsehoods and gross distortions
(19:07) “Forcible” removal
(24:04) “Researcher at CSER”
(27:30) Giving What We Can
(31:20) Brief Digression on Effective Altruism
(33:53) More falsehoods and distortions
(33:57) Hilary Greaves
(38:25) Andreas Mogensen
(41:16) Nick Beckstead
(45:29) Tyler Cowen
(48:50) Olle Häggström
(56:44) Sockpuppetry
(57:01) “Alex Williams”
(01:03:57) Conclusion
First published:
May 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yAHcPNZzx35i25xML/emile-p-torres-s-history-of-dishonesty-and-harassment
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The UK government's public consultation for their proposed animal welfare labelling scheme[1] closes on the 7th of May. I.e. a week away. If you’re in the UK and care about animal welfare, I think you should probably submit an answer to it. If you don't care about animal welfare, forget you saw this.
In this post I’ll briefly explain what the proposed labelling scheme is, reasons to be hopeful (and cautious), why a public consultation may be unusually impactful, and how to fill in the form. If you’re only interested in the final point, skip to this section. I’ve included a link to a document which provides great suggested answers to make the submission process much easier (I estimate it saved me up to an hour).
PS: I call for out of season Draft Amnesty on this post— I wanted to get it out quickly to give [...]
Outline:
(01:04) What is Defra proposing?
(03:09) How promising is animal welfare labelling?
(05:09) How influential are public consultations?
(05:50) How to fill in the consultation form.
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
April 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Bk7GycBvuj75HYKis/one-week-left-to-give-feedback-on-the-uk-mandatory-welfare
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We just published an interview: Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals. Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say, “Actually, we can push them further in these ways and these ways, and they still stay alive. And we’ve modelled out every possibility and we’ve found that it works.”
I think another possibility, which I don’t understand as well, is that AI could lock in current moral values. And I think in particular there's a risk that if AI is learning from what we do as humans [...]
Outline:
(00:34) Episode summary
(03:19) Highlights
(03:22) Factory farming is philosophically indefensible
(06:30) Incremental reform vs revolutionary change
(13:19) Fish welfare concerns
(17:21) Farmed animal advocacy in Asia
(21:17) Effects of AI
(24:09) The first Supreme Court win for farmed animals
First published:
April 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XgGkHmxEoetqCuqZF/185-the-7-most-promising-ways-to-end-factory-farming-and
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
GPT-5 training is probably starting around now. It seems very unlikely that GPT-5 will cause the end of the world. But it's hard to be sure. I would guess that GPT-5 is more likely to kill me than an asteroid, a supervolcano, a plane crash or a brain tumor. We can predict fairly well what the cross-entropy loss will be, but pretty much nothing else.
Maybe we will suddenly discover that the difference between GPT-4 and superhuman level is actually quite small. Maybe GPT-5 will be extremely good at interpretability, such that it can recursively self improve by rewriting its own weights.
Hopefully model evaluations can catch catastrophic risks before wide deployment, but again, it's hard to be sure. GPT-5 could plausibly be devious enough so circumvent all of our black-box testing. Or it may be that it's too late as soon as the model has been trained. These [...]
Outline:
(01:10) How do we do better for GPT-6?
(02:02) Plan B: Mass protests against AI
(03:06) No innovation required
(04:36) The discomfort of doing something weird
(05:53) Preparing for the moment
First published:
April 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/J8sw7o5mWbGFaBW4o/why-i-m-doing-pauseai
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a linkpost for https://ailabwatch.org
I'm launching AI Lab Watch. I collected actions for frontier AI labs to improve AI safety, then evaluated some frontier labs accordingly.
It's a collection of information on what labs should do and what labs are doing. It also has some adjacent resources, including a list of other safety-ish scorecard-ish stuff.
(It's much better on desktop than mobile — don't read it on mobile.)
It's in beta—leave feedback here or comment or DM me—but I basically endorse the content and you're welcome to share and discuss it publicly.
It's unincorporated, unfunded, not affiliated with any orgs/people, and is just me.
Some clarifications and disclaimers.
How you can help:
- Give feedback on how this project is helpful or how it could be different to be much more helpful
- Tell me what's wrong/missing; point me to sources on what labs should do or [...]
First published:
April 30th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GyoHJA5fzFRjgGw9m/introducing-ai-lab-watch
Linkpost URL:
https://ailabwatch.org
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Effective today, I’ve left Open Philanthropy and joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace[1] as a Visiting Scholar. At Carnegie, I will analyze and write about topics relevant to AI risk reduction. In the short term, I will focus on (a) what AI capabilities might increase the risk of a global catastrophe; (b) how we can catch early warning signs of these capabilities; and (c) what protective measures (for example, strong information security) are important for safely handling such capabilities. This is a continuation of the work I’ve been doing over the last ~year.
I want to be explicit about why I’m leaving Open Philanthropy. It's because my work no longer involves significant involvement in grantmaking, and given that I’ve overseen grantmaking historically, it's a significant problem for there to be confusion on this point. Philanthropy comes with particular power dynamics that I’d like to move away from, and [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
April 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7gzgwgwefwBku2cnL/joining-the-carnegie-endowment-for-international-peace
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Key takeaways
- Apply for our 5-week virtual Career Fellowship before May 12th.
- It will take place online in May and June 2024.
- Who should apply? Medical professionals (and students) aiming to plan their high impact career
About
The Hi-Med Career Fellowship is a 5-week programme designed to help you figure out medical professionals (and students) high-impact career path might look like, set specific goals, and explore actionable next steps. In addition, you will learn different methods to reflect on your career and use decision-making processes, prioritisation, and career planning tools in a group of peers.
You should have at least 4 hours per week to commit to it.
When? mid May to mid June 📆 - online 🖥️
You can find more information here - please read and then continue with the application form- The application deadline is May 12th, 11 pm CET.
Hopefully, we will see [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Key takeaways
(00:26) About
First published:
April 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jiX44oX9GhNzkPzZ4/announcing-the-2024-spring-cohort-of-hi-med-s-career
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We’re hiring for senior research and tech team members! Please apply if you’re interested, and share the openings with people in your network who might be a great fit.
The Head of Technology will take broad ownership of GiveWell's technology function and build a strong tech team. The ideal candidate has built and scaled a tech team at least once, and has deep subject matter expertise. This role is remote-eligible within the United States.
Senior Researchers will lead ambitious research agendas, answer complex questions, and inform high-impact grantmaking decisions. Applicants must have a quantitatively oriented advanced degree or an undergraduate degree and substantial relevant experience using empirical tools to make real-world decisions. This role is remote-eligible anywhere in the world.
Both roles have compensation packages that are competitive with our peer organizations.
First published:
April 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7pwHdJG8uhSh8XaS6/givewell-is-hiring-a-head-of-tech-and-senior-researchers
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
What would Ruth and Henry do?
How much can one person achieve for animals? Ruth Harrison (1920-2000) and Henry Spira (1927-1998) started out pessimistic. They inherited an animal welfare movement that had generated more noise than results, especially for farmed animals.
As factory farming arose in the mid 20th Century, the movement paid little attention. Moderate groups, like the ASPCA and RSPCA, were too busy sheltering lost cats and dogs — a role that had largely supplanted their original missions to win legal reforms for all animals.
Radical activists, meanwhile, were waging an endless war on animal testing. “Self-righteous antivivisection societies had been hollering, 'Abolition! All or Nothing!,'” Spira recalled, noting that during that time [...]
First published:
April 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KmS2SwaC2EEhq2duw/lessons-from-two-pioneering-advocates-for-farmed-animals
Linkpost URL:
https://farmanimalwelfare.substack.com/p/what-would-ruth-and-henry-do
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I
Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement, whose early influences came from socialist intellectual communities such as the Fabian Society, as opposed to the rationalist diaspora. Let's name this hypothetical movement the Effective Samaritans.
Like the EA movement of today, they believe in doing as much good as possible, whatever this means. They began by evaluating existing charities, reading every RCT to find the very best ways of helping.
But many effective samaritans were starting to wonder. Is this randomista approach really the most prudent? After all, Scandinavia didn’t become wealthy and equitable through marginal charity. Societal transformation comes from uprooting oppressive power structures.
The Scandinavian societal model which lifted the working class, brought weekends, universal suffrage, maternity leave, education, and universal healthcare can be traced back all the way to 1870's where the union and social democratic movements got their start.
In many developing countries [...]
Outline:
(00:03) I
(05:39) II
(10:19) III
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
April 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PKotuzY8yzGSNKRpH/priors-and-prejudice
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The last ten years have witnessed rapid advances in the science of animal cognition and behavior. Striking results have hinted at surprisingly rich inner lives in a wide range of animals, driving renewed debate about animal consciousness.
To highlight these advances, the NYU Mind, Ethics and Policy Program and NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program co-hosted a conference on the emerging science of animal consciousness on Friday April 19 at New York University. This conference also served as the launch event for The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness.
This short statement, signed by leading scientists who research a wide range of taxa, holds that all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects) have a realistic chance of being conscious, and that their welfare merits consideration.
We now welcome signatures from others as well. If you have relevant [...]
First published:
April 21st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pqkf5N7LkHfd7rRBf/announcing-the-new-york-declaration-on-animal-consciousness
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Disclaimer: While I criticize several EA critics in this article, I am myself on the EA-skeptical side of things (especially on AI risk).
Introduction.
I am a proud critic of effective altruism, and in particular a critic of AI existential risk, but I have to admit that a lot of the critcism of EA is hostile, or lazy, and is extremely unlikely to convince a believer.
Take this recent Leif Weinar time article as an example. I liked a few of the object level critiques, but many of the points were twisted, and the overall point was hopelessly muddled (are they trying to say that voluntourism is the solution here?). As people have noted, the piece was needlessly hostile to EA (and incredibly hostile to Will Macaskill in particular). And he's far from the only prominent hater. Emille Torres views EA as a threat to humanity. Timnit Gebru sees [...]
Outline:
(02:21) No door to door atheists
(04:51) What went wrong here?
(08:40) Motivation gaps in AI x-risk
(10:59) EA gap analysis
(15:12) Counter-motivations
(25:49) You can’t rely on ingroup criticism
(29:10) How to respond to motivation gaps
First published:
April 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CfBNdStftKGc863o6/motivation-gaps-why-so-much-ea-criticism-is-hostile-and-lazy
Linkpost URL:
https://titotal.substack.com/p/motivation-gaps-why-so-much-ea-criticism
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
- In this post, I hope to inspire other Effective Altruists to focus more on donation and commiserate with those who have been disappointed in their ability to get an altruistic job.
- First, I argue that the impact of having a job that helps others is complicated. In this section, I discuss annual donation statistics of people in the Effective Altruism community donate, which I find quite low.
-
In the rest of the post, I describe my recent job search, my experience substituting at public schools, and my expenses. Having a job that helps others might be overemphasized
-
Doing a job that helps others seems like a good thing to do. Weirdly, it's not as simple as that.
- While some job vacancies last for years, other fields are very competitive and have many qualified applicants for most position listings.
- In the latter case, if you take the [...]
- While some job vacancies last for years, other fields are very competitive and have many qualified applicants for most position listings.
Outline:
(00:42) Having a job that helps others might be overemphasized
(02:07) Donations are an amazing opportunity, and I think they are underemphasized
(03:42) I used to really want an animal welfare-related job. Then I wanted to donate more. Now I am a substitute at a public school
(06:13) I live frugally and donate
(08:06) I have been disappointed in my ability to find a job that would allow me to donate more
(09:52) Its okay
(10:24) Additional reading
First published:
April 16th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/G9ocwYA2LpLqC4vmq/how-good-it-is-to-donate-and-how-hard-it-is-to-get-a-job
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Attend his talk if he's giving one By Jacob Trefethen
Scientific conferences are great even if you’re an outsider to the field. That's common advice for students, and there are useful guides written on how to get the most out of conferences you're new to. But I suspect people at all career stages could benefit from hearing the advice again – people with adjacent research experience in industry or academia, or who have started organisations before, or who have an inkling something exciting lurks around the corner.
In other words, I wish people reminded me to go to conferences as an outsider more often. I seem to re-learn their value with wonder every one I attend. So here is a post for you, future Jacob.
Often scientific fields host annual conferences that have been running for a decade, or many decades. People grumble about the schedule and the snacks. Jetlag [...]
Outline:
(02:15) To the best of my understanding, I only have one life to live
(05:21) But Im an outsider to the field!
(07:04) List of 41 conferences
First published:
April 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n8APGKhs8Dut9vXGJ/conferences-are-great-for-scientific-entrepreneurs
Linkpost URL:
https://blog.jacobtrefethen.com/conferences/
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The two podcasts where I discuss FTX are now out:
- Making Sense with Sam Harris
- Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg
The Sam Harris podcast is more aimed at a general audience; the Spencer Greenberg podcast is more aimed at people already familiar with EA. (I’ve also done another podcast with Chris Anderson from TED that will come out next month, but FTX is a fairly small part of that conversation.)
In this post, I’ll gather together some things I talk about across these podcasts — this includes updates and lessons, and responses to some questions that have been raised on the Forum recently. I’d recommend listening to the podcasts first, but these comments can be read on their own, too. I cover a variety of different topics, so I’ll cover each topic in separate comments underneath this post.
First published:
April 18th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A2vBJGEbKDpuKveHk/personal-reflections-on-ftx
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Anders Sandberg has written a “final report” released simultaneously with the announcement of FHI's closure. The abstract and an excerpt follow.
Normally manifestos are written first, and then hopefully stimulate actors to implement their vision. This document is the reverse: an epitaph summarizing what the Future of Humanity Institute was, what we did and why, what we learned, and what we think comes next. It can be seen as an oral history of FHI from some of its members. It will not be unbiased, nor complete, but hopefully a useful historical source. I have received input from other people who worked at FHI, but it is my perspective and others would no doubt place somewhat different emphasis on the various strands of FHI work.
What we did well
One of the most important insights from the successes of FHI is to have a long-term perspective on one's research. While [...]
Outline:
(00:57) What we did well
(03:48) Where we failed
(05:06) So, you want to start another FHI?
First published:
April 17th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uK27pds7J36asqJPt/future-of-humanity-institute-2005-2024-final-report
Linkpost URL:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ml8d3ubi3ippxs4yon63n/FHI-Final-Report.pdf?rlkey=2c94czhgagy27d9don7pvbc26&dl=0
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Author: Sam Hilton, AIM Director of Research
In March 2021 I received an odd letter. It was from a guy I didn't know, David Quarrey, the UK's National Security Advisor. The letter thanked me for providing external expertise to the UK government's Integrated Review, which had been published that morning. It turns out that the Integrated Review has made a public commitment to "review our approach to risk assessment" ... "including how we account for interdependencies, cascading and compound risks". This is something I'd been advocating for over the previous few months by writing a policy paper and engaging with politicians and civil servants. It's hard to know how much my input changed government policy but I couldn’t find much evidence of others advocating for this. I had set myself a 10-year goal to "have played a role in making the UK a leader in long-term resilience to extreme [...]
First published:
April 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RmZWjTLNTg4hby7pz/aim-s-new-guide-to-launching-a-high-impact-non-profit-policy
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In the aftermath of SBF's convinction, there have been a few posts trying to make sense of FTX. Some people are trying to figure out what happened, and some people are interested in trying to find clever defenses.
I'm in a much more boring position: I am confident SBF is the fraud the world believes him to be. I hope this post can provide reasoning transparency on why I think this, and perhaps serve as an easy link for others who feel similarly but don't want to get bogged down in a point-by-point.
Posted anonymously as some protection against future employers Googling [1].
I have divided this post into a summary of the major crimes and my basis for believing they occurred, an 'FAQ' dealing with some common misapprehensions I've seen on this forum and elsewhere, and an appendix explaining some crypto exchange basics / jargon for those [...]
Outline:
(00:56) Crimes
(00:59) Misappropriation of Funds
(01:51) Detail
(14:47) Lying to lenders
(17:21) Lying to FTXs investors
(18:28) Lying to Banks
(19:02) Detail
(21:53) Bribing a Chinese official
(23:55) Falsified revenue
(25:07) Falsified Insurance Fund
(26:20) FAQ
(26:23) Didnt SBF only know about the hole in June 2022?
(30:16) Didnt customers know their funds might be lent out?
(32:37) Werent FTX and Alameda total messes? Intent matters; isnt it possible that this all got lost in the chaos?
(35:13) Isnt FTX going to make all Customers whole? So there wasnt ever a hole?
(35:47) FTX cashed out customers at bankruptcy prices
(36:32) The assets those customers money had bought did well
(37:12) Had FTX stayed afloat, things would be very different
(38:58) Appendix
(39:02) How crypto exchanges work
(39:06) Spot Trading
(40:54) Margin Trading
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
April 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qyN8M6zh6pnh8fmjR/understanding-ftx-s-crimes
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Thanks to Eli Lifland, Molly Hickman, Değer Turan, and Evan Miyazono for reviewing drafts of this post. The opinions expressed here are my own.
Summary:
- Forecasters produce reasons and models that are often more valuable than the final forecasts
- Most of this value is being lost due to the historical practice & incentives of forecasting, and the difficulty of crowds to “adversarially collaborate”
- FutureSearch is a forecasting system with legible reasons and models at its core (examples at the end)
The Curious Case of the Missing Reasoning
Ben Landau-Taylor of Bismarck Analysis wrote a piece on March 6 called “Probability Is Not A Substitute For Reasoning”, citing a piece where he writes:
There has been a great deal of research on what criteria must be met for forecasting aggregations to be useful, and as Karger, Atanasov, and Tetlock argue, predictions of events such as the arrival of AGI [...]
Outline:
(00:40) The Curious Case of the Missing Reasoning
(05:06) Those Who Seek Rationales, And Those Who Do Not
(07:21) So What Do Elite Forecasters Actually Know?
(10:30) The Rationale-Shaped Hole At The Heart Of Forecasting
(11:51) Facts: Cite Your Sources
(12:07) Reasons: So You Think You Can Persuade With Words
(14:25) Models: So You Think You Can Model the World
(17:56) There Is No Microeconomics of AGI
(19:39) 700 AI questions you say? Aren’t We In the Age of AI Forecasters?
(21:33) Towards “Towards Rationality Engines”
(23:10) Sample Forecasts With Reasons and Models
First published:
April 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qMP7LcCBFBEtuA3kL/the-rationale-shaped-hole-at-the-heart-of-forecasting
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Here in the UK, the government is consulting on mandatory animal welfare labelling (closing 7 May 2024). People may wish to respond if they want to express their support or share thoughts and evidence that could shape the outcomes.
I think such labelling has the potential to significantly improve animal welfare, not just through changing individual choices but by encouraging companies to stop selling the lowest welfare tiers entirely, and through raising labelling standards over time. Higher standards will probably also mean higher prices, lower consumption and 'fairer' competition with alternative proteins. What happens in the UK may also influence future reforms in the EU and elsewhere.
To summarise the proposals:
- Mandatory labelling would apply to chicken, eggs and pig products (with the suggestion that beef, lamb and dairy could follow later)
- At least initially, this would not apply to restaurants etc., but to food from retailers like [...]
First published:
March 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h5Syjytgbg7fL6CJ5/uk-moves-toward-mandatory-animal-welfare-labelling
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Is anyone in the world being paid to do an independent investigation of how EA handled Sam Bankman-Fried, with respect to "did we screw up" and "is there stuff we should do differently going forward"?
Last I heard, literally nobody was doing this and at least some EA leaders were mostly just hoping that SBF gets memoryholed — but maybe I'm out of the loop?
My understanding is that Effective Ventures completed a narrow investigation into this topic in mid-2023, purely looking at legal risk to EV and not at all trying to do a general postmortem for EA or any group of EAs. Is that correct, and have things changed since then?
I saw that Will MacAskill is planning to appear on some podcasts soon to speak about SBF, which seems like great news to mee. If I recall correctly, Will previously said that he was going to [...]
First published:
April 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAG3DJtoZeGtz488f/why-hasn-t-ea-done-an-sbf-investigation-and-postmortem
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A brief and belated update: When I resigned from the board of EV US last year, I was planning on writing about that decision. But I ultimately decided against doing that for a variety of reasons, including that it was very costly to me, and I believed it wouldn’t make a difference. However, I want to make it clear that I resigned last year due to significant disagreements with the board of EV and EA leadership, particularly concerning their actions leading up to and after the FTX crisis.
While I certainly support the boards’ decision to pay back the FTX estate, spin out the projects as separate organizations, and essentially disband EV, I continue to be worried that the EA community is not on track to learn the relevant lessons from its relationship with FTX. Two things that I think would help (though I am not planning to work [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
April 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dtHZqi4fSQKor6TYY/quick-update-on-leaving-the-board-of-ev
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Following the success of Draft Amnesty Week, the Forum team have decided to take things a bit further.
April 2nd 2024 will be Mandatory Amnesty Day (aka MAD).
At 09:00 UTC, all draft posts on your Forum account will be posted live on the Forum.
All the posts in this section on your profile page deserve to be seen. If you have used our Google Docs import feature, all posts we detect on your Google account will also be posted.
Shrek is now the de facto mascot of Draft Amnesty. If, for some reason, you have objections, please get in touch with the Forum team here.
We look forward to seeing all your draft posts!
First published:
April 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/72cKFaXd2B7Bis2kv/announcing-mandatory-draft-amnesty-day-april-2nd
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Impactful Animal Advocacy is thrilled to announce that after careful consideration and complex moral calculations, we have decided to rebrand to Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy.
Why shrimp, you ask? Well, we've crunched the numbers and determined that improving the welfare of shrimp is one of the highest-impact opportunities in the animal advocacy space.
Source: https://foodimpacts.org/
In light of this strong evidence, Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy will be laser-focusing all of our efforts and resources on ending the suffering of our shrimpy friends.
This includes revamping our programs to focus on our new mission. You'll soon be able to sign up for our revised Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy newsletter, attend our upcoming "Shrimp-osium" events, visit our Shrimp Hub resource center, and join our Shrimp Slack community to connect with fellow Shrimpactful Advocates.
We call on all other organizations to join us in this:
- Mercy for Animals → Mercy for [...]
First published:
April 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ed5Jiuk3sCYTXHfFD/announcement-we-are-rebranding-to-shrimpactful-animal
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
(aka "surely we have enough Jews here that at least one person finds this funny")
MISHNA: Rabbi Ord says that the three permissible cause areas are global health and development, animal welfare, and long-termism. Why are these the three permissible cause areas? Because any charity outside of these cause areas is a violation of bal tashchit, the prohibition against wasting resources.
GEMARA: And why not four categories, because global health and development are two separate categories? Rabbi bar bar Hana answers: Is not global health valuable only because it later leads to development? Therefore, consider them the same category.
Rav Yehuda objects. He tells the story of a student who asked Rabbi Yohanan why there should not be a fourth category, meta-effective-altruism. Rabbi Yohanan answered: this is covered under long-termism, because it pays off in the long-term when the meta-charity causes effective altruists to have more resources. But if [...]
First published:
April 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/363kggkFJHz5ys5T7/excerpts-from-the-ea-talmud
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It's been at least a few months since the last proper EA scandals, and we're now desperately trying to squeeze headlines out of the past ones.
On the contrary, a few scandals have been wrapped up:
- SBF was sentenced to 25 years in prison
- The investigation regarding Owen Cotton-Barratt presented its findings
- Whytham Abbey is being sold
Indeed, even OpenPhil's involvement in the Whytham Abbey sale shows they're now less willing to fund new scandals.
Therefore it seems to me that EA is now neither funding- nor talent-constrained, but rather scandal-constrained.
This cannot go on. We've all become accustomed to a neverending stream od scandals, and if that stream dwindles, we might find ourselves bored to death - or worse, the world might stop talking about EA all the time.
I therefore raise a few ideas for discussion - feel free to add your own:
- EA Funds [...]
First published:
April 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/F47vckGK5kHZirtGS/ea-is-now-scandal-constrained
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), an effective altruism (EA) project which recently spun out of Effective Ventures (EV) is spinning out of the newly established Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA).
The current CEO of CEA (the Centre for Effective Altruism), Zach Robinson, CEO of CEA and Effective Ventures (CEOCEV), will be taking the position of Chief Executive Administrator (CEA) for CEA (CEA), as the venture spins out of CEA (CEA).
The cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) for this new effective venture suggested that this venture will be high-EV (see: EA). CEA's CEA's CEA ventures that the new spun-out CEA venture's effectiveness is cost-effective in every available scenario (CEAS).
CEA's new strategy, See EA will take effect:
- See: Gain a better understanding of where the community is, who is part of it and where it could go
- EA: Effective altruism. No need to complicate things.
To provide some clarity on [...]
First published:
April 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WgneAKfjRJkYsTs3p/the-centre-for-effective-altruism-is-spinning-out-of-the
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Hillary Clinton, who is still alive
I'm proud and excited to announce the founding of my new startup, Open Asteroid Impact, where we redirect asteroids towards Earth for the benefit of humanity. Our mission is to have as high an impact as possible.
Below, I've copied over the one-pager I've sent potential investors and early employees:
Name: Open Asteroid Impact
Launch Date: April 1 2024
Website: openasteroidimpact.org
Mission: To have as high an impact as possible
Pitch: We are an asteroid mining company. When most people think about asteroid mining, they think of getting all the mining equipment to space and carefully mining and refining ore in space, before bringing the ore back down in a controlled landing. But humanity has zero experience in Zero-G mining in the vacuum of space. This is obviously very inefficient. Instead, it's much [...]
First published:
April 1st, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RHGfmJfj3jvLw2mq4/introducing-open-asteroid-impact
Linkpost URL:
https://openasteroidimpact.org/
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Like many organizations, Open Philanthropy has had multiple founding moments. Depending on how you count, we will be either seven, ten, or thirteen years old this year. Regardless of when you start the clock, it's possible that we’ve changed more in the last two years than over our full prior history. We’ve more than doubled the size of our team (to ~110), nearly doubled our annual giving (to >$750M), and added five new program areas.
As our track record and volume of giving have grown, we are seeing more of our impact in the world. Across our focus areas, our funding played a (sometimes modest) role in some of 2023's most important developments:
- We were among the supporters of the clinical trials that led to the World Health Organization (WHO) officially recommending the R21 malaria vaccine. This is the second malaria vaccine recommended by WHO, which expects it [...]
First published:
March 27th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/couP8n3BTrpFA5YDJ/open-philanthropy-our-progress-in-2023-and-plans-for-2024-1
Linkpost URL:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/our-progress-in-2023-and-plans-for-2024/
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The Wytham Abbey Project is closing. After input from the Abbey's major donors, the EV board took a decision to sell the property. This project's runway will run out at the end of April. After this time, the project will cease operations, and EV UK will oversee the sale of the property. The Wytham Abbey team have been good custodians of the venue during the time they ran this project, and EV UK will continue to look after this property as we prepare to sell. The proceeds of the sale, after the cost of sale is covered, will be allocated to high-impact charities.
A statement from the Wytham Project can be found here.
First published:
March 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yggjKEeehsnmMYnZd/announcement-on-the-future-of-wytham-abbey
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post was partly inspired by, and shares some themes with, this Joe Carlsmith post. My post (unsurprisingly) expresses fewer concepts with less clarity and resonance, but is hopefully of some value regardless.
Content warning: description of animal death.
I live in a small, one-bedroom flat in central London. Sometime in the summer of 2023, I started noticing moths around my flat.
I didn’t pay much attention to it, since they seemed pretty harmless: they obviously weren’t food moths, since they were localised in my bedroom, and they didn’t seem to be chewing holes in any of my clothes — months went by and no holes appeared. [1] The larvae only seemed to be in my carpet.
Eventually, their numbers started increasing, so I decided to do something about it.
I Googled humane and nonlethal ways to deal with moth infestations, but found nothing. There were lots of sources [...]
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
March 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ax5PwjqtrunQJgjsA/killing-the-moths
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I've been writing a few posts critical of EA over at my blog. They might be of interest to people here:
- Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism
- Alternative Visions of Effective Altruism
- Auftragstaktik
- Hurdles of using forecasting as a tool for making sense of AI progress
- Brief thoughts on CEA's stewardship of the EA Forum
- Why are we not harder, better, faster, stronger?
- ...and there are a few smaller pieces on my blog as well.
I appreciate comments and perspectives anywhere, but prefer them over at the individual posts at my blog, since I have a large number of disagreements with the EA Forum's approach to moderation, curation, aesthetics or cost-effectiveness.
First published:
March 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/coWvsGuJPyiqBdrhC/unflattering-aspects-of-effective-altruism
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
- Satisfaction with the EA community
- Reported satisfaction, from 1 (Very dissatisfied) to 10 (Very satisfied), in December 2023/January 2024 was lower than when we last measured it shortly after the FTX crisis at the end of 2022 (6.77 vs. 6.99, respectively).
- However, December 2023/January 2024 satisfaction ratings were higher than what people recalled their satisfaction being “shortly after the FTX collapse” (and their recalled level of satisfaction was lower than what we measured their satisfaction as being at the end of 2022).
- We think it's plausible that satisfaction reached a nadir at some point later than December 2022, but may have improved since that point, while still being lower than pre-FTX.
- Reasons for dissatisfaction with EA:
- A number of factors were cited a similar number of times by respondents as Very important reasons for dissatisfaction, among those who provided a reason: Cause prioritization (22%), Leadership (20%), Justice, Equity, Inclusion and [...]
Outline:
(04:15) Community satisfaction over time
(08:12) Reasons for dissatisfaction with the EA community
(13:07) Changes in EA engagement
(14:00) Changes in EA-related behaviors
(15:57) Perception of issues in the EA community
(16:14) Leadership vacuum
(16:46) Desire for more community change following FTX
(17:13) Trust in EA-related organizations
(18:53) Appendix
(18:56) Effect sizes for satisfaction over time
(20:12) Email vs non-email referrers
(21:30) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
March 20th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aF6nh4LW6sSbgMLzL/updates-on-community-health-survey-results
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TLDR: we think the limiting factor for new charities has shifted from founder talent to early stage funding being the top limiting factor.
We have historically written about limiting factors and how they affect our thinking about the highest impact areas. For new charities, over the past 4-5 years, fairly consistently, the limiting factor has been people; specifically, the fairly rare founder profile that we look for and think has the best chance at founding a field-leading charity. However, we think over the last 12 months this picture has changed in some important ways:
- Firstly, we have started founding more charities: After founding ~5 charities a year in 2021 and 2022 we founded 8 charities in 2023 and we think there are good odds we will be able to found ~10-12 charities in 2024. This is a pretty large change. We have not changed our standards for [...]
First published:
March 19th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AXhC4JhWFfsjBB4CA/the-current-limiting-factor-for-new-charities
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I've written before about trying to bring US private foundations into EA as major funders. I got some helpful feedback and haven't really pursued it further. I study US private foundations as a researcher and recently conducted a qualitative data collection of staff at 20 very large US private foundations ($100m+ assets). The subject of the study isn't directly EA related (focused mostly on how they use accounting/effectiveness information and accountability), but it got me thinking a lot!
Some interesting observations that I am going to explore further, in future forum posts (if y'all think it's interesting) and future research papers:
- Trust-based philanthropy (TBP), a funder movement that's only been around since 2020, has had a HUGE impact on very large private foundations. All 20 indicated that they had already/were in the process of integrating TBP into their grantmaking. I can't emphasize enough how influential TBP has been. [...]
First published:
March 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pnv6PRyeCPZknsbEw/the-lack-of-ea-in-us-private-foundations
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a draft amnesty post.
Summary.
- It seems plausible that fetuses can suffer from 12 weeks of age, and quite reasonable that then can suffer from 24 weeks of age.
- Some late-term abortion procedures seem that they might cause a fetus excruciating suffering.
- Over 35,000 of these procedures occur each year in the US alone.
- Further research would be desired on interventions to reduce this suffering, such as mandating fetal anesthesia for late-term abortions.
Background
Most people agree that a fetus has the capacity to suffer at some point. If a fetus has the capacity to suffer, then we ought to reduce that suffering when possible. Fetal anesthesia is standard practice for fetal surgery,[1] but I am unaware of it ever being used during late-term abortions. If the fetus can suffer, these procedures likely cause the fetus extreme pain.
I think the cultural environment EAs usually [...]
Outline:
(00:40) Background
(01:28) Surgical Abortion Procedures
(01:34) LI (Labor Induction)
(02:18) DandE (Dilation and Evacuation)
(02:38) When Can a Fetus Suffer?
(03:46) Scale in US and UK
(03:50) 2021 UK
(04:05) 2020 USA
(05:02) Interventions
The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
March 17th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vhKZ7hyzmcrWuBwDL/the-scale-of-fetal-suffering-in-late-term-abortions
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I like Open Phil's worldview diversification. But I don't think their current roster of worldviews does a good job of justifying their current practice. In this post, I'll suggest a reconceptualization that may seem radical in theory but is conservative in practice. Something along these lines strikes me as necessary to justify giving substantial support to paradigmatic Global Health & Development charities in the face of competition from both Longtermist/x-risk and Animal Welfare competitor causes.
Current Orthodoxy
I take it that Open Philanthropy's current "cause buckets" or candidate worldviews are typically conceived of as follows:
- neartermist - incl. animal welfare
- neartermist - human-only
- longtermism / x-risk
We're told that how to weigh these cause areas against each other "hinge[s] on very debatable, uncertain questions." (True enough!) But my impression is that EAs often take the relevant questions to be something like, should we be speciesist? and should we [...]
Outline:
(00:35) Current Orthodoxy
(01:17) The Problem
(02:43) A Proposed Solution
(04:26) Implications
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
March 18th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dmEwQZSbPsYhFay2G/ea-worldviews-need-rethinking
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In 2022, Aquatic Life Institute (ALI) led the charge in Banding Together to Ban Octopus Farming. In 2024, we are ecstatic to see these efforts come to fruition in Washington State.
This landmark achievement underscores our collective commitment to rejecting the introduction of additional animals into the seafood system and positions Washington State as a true pioneer in aquatic animal welfare legislation. In light of this success, ALI is joining forces with various organizations to advocate for similar bans across the United States and utilizing these monumental examples as leverage in continuous European endeavors.
2022
Aquatic Life Institute (ALI) and members of the Aquatic Animal Alliance (AAA) comment on the Environmental Impact of Nueva Pescanova before the Government of the Canary Islands: General Directorate of Fisheries and the General Directorate for the Fight against Climate Change and the Environment.
Allowing this industrial octopus farm to operate [...]
Outline:
(00:45) 2022
(01:44) 2023
(03:37) 2024
(04:50) March 14, 2024
First published:
March 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AD8QchabkrygXkdgm/we-did-it-victory-for-octopus-in-washington-state
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Maternal Health Initiative (MHI) was founded out of Charity Entrepreneurship (AIM)'s 2022 Incubation Program and has since piloted two interventions integrating postpartum (post-birth) contraceptive counselling into routine care appointments in Ghana. We concluded this pilot work in December 2023.
A stronger understanding of the context and impact of postpartum family planning work, on the back of our pilot results, has led us to conclude that our intervention is not among the most cost-effective interventions available. We’ve therefore decided to shut down and redirect our funding to other organisations.
This article summarises MHI's work, our assessment of the value of postpartum family planning programming, and our decision to shut down MHI as an organisation in light of our results. We also share some lessons learned. An in-depth report expanding on the same themes is available on our website.
We encourage you to skip to the sections that are [...]
Outline:
(01:40) Why we chose to pursue postpartum family planning
(01:45) Why family planning?
(02:28) Why postpartum (post-birth)?
(03:49) MHI: An overview of our work
(06:16) Pilot: Design
(08:54) Pilot: Results
(08:58) Sample Population
(09:36) Implementation
(10:19) Changes in Contraceptive Uptake
(11:13) Conclusions From Our Pilot Results
(13:13) Why We No Longer Believe Postpartum Family Planning Is Among The Most Cost-Effective Interventions
(13:35) Evidence of Limited Effects on Unintended Pregnancies
(16:06) The Prevalence and Impact of Postpartum Insusceptibility
(17:07) Short-Spaced Pregnancies
(17:48) Theory of Change
(18:14) Other Factors
(18:28) Broader Thoughts on Family Planning
(18:45) Concerns
(20:43) Reasons We Still Believe In The Importance Of Family Planning Work
(22:53) Choosing to Shut Down
(23:43) Considering a Pivot
(26:47) Proceeding to Shut Down
(27:38) Lessons
(33:39) Conclusions
First published:
March 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MWSwSXNmsSBaEKtKw/maternal-health-initiative-is-shutting-down
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
by Anemone Franz and Tessa Alexanian
80,000 Hours ranks preventing catastrophic pandemics as one of the most pressing problems in the world, and we have advised many of our readers to work in biosecurity to have high-impact careers.
But biosecurity is a complex field, and while the threat is undoubtedly large, there's a lot of disagreement about how best to conceptualise and mitigate the risks. We wanted to get a better sense of how the people thinking about these threats every day perceive the risks.
So we decided to talk to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to better understand their views.
To make them feel comfortable speaking candidly, we granted the experts we spoke to anonymity. Sometimes disagreements in this space can get contentious, and certainly many of the experts we spoke to disagree with one another. We don’t endorse every position they’ve articulated below.
We think, though [...]
Outline:
(02:47) Expert 1: Failures of imagination and appeals to authority
(04:54) Expert 2: Exaggerating small-scale risks and Western chauvinism
(06:32) Expert 3: Useless reports and the world beyond effective altruism
(07:09) Expert 4: Overconfidence in threat models
(08:05) Expert 5: Interventions that don’t address the largest threats
(09:01) Expert 6: Over-reliance on past experience and overconfidence about the future
(10:59) Expert 7: Resistance from governments and antagonising expert communities
(13:50) Expert 8: Preparing for the “Big One” looks like preparing for the smaller ones
(14:31) Expert 9: ChatGPT is not dangerous
(16:52) Expert 10: The barriers to bioweapons are not that high
(18:24) Expert 11: We don’t need silver bullets
(18:57) Expert 12: Three failure modes
(19:32) Expert 13: Groupthink and failing to be scope sensitive
(20:47) Expert 14: COVID-19 does not equal biological weapons
First published:
February 29th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NGFkW4Qxww9jGESrk/what-are-the-biggest-misconceptions-about-biosecurity-and
Linkpost URL:
https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-misconceptions-about-biosecurity/
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This might be one of the best pieces of introductory content to the concepts of effective giving that GWWC has produced in recent years!
I hit the streets of London to engage with everyday people about their views on charity, giving back, and where they thought they stood on the global income scale.
This video was made to engage people with some of the core concepts of income inequality and charity effectiveness in the hope of getting more people interested in giving effectively.
If you enjoy it - I'd really appreciate a like, comment or share on YouTube to help us reach more people!
There's a blog post and transcript of the video available too.
Big thanks to Suzy Sheperd for directing and editing this project and to Julian Jamison and Habiba Banu for being interviewed!
First published:
March 13th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tX2MqRfZtz7TqYCQi/new-video-you-re-richer-than-you-realise
Linkpost URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekIRVhbpiQw
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Authors of linked report: Josh Rosenberg, Ezra Karger, Avital Morris, Molly Hickman, Rose Hadshar, Zachary Jacobs, Philip Tetlock[1]
Today, the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) released “Roots of Disagreement on AI Risk: Exploring the Potential and Pitfalls of Adversarial Collaboration,” which discusses the results of an adversarial collaboration focused on forecasting risks from AI.
In this post, we provide a brief overview of the methods, findings, and directions for further research. For much more analysis and discussion, see the full report: https://forecastingresearch.org/s/AIcollaboration.pdf
Abstract.
We brought together generalist forecasters and domain experts (n=22) who disagreed about the risk AI poses to humanity in the next century. The “concerned” participants (all of whom were domain experts) predicted a 20% chance of an AI-caused existential catastrophe by 2100, while the “skeptical” group (mainly “superforecasters”) predicted a 0.12% chance. Participants worked together to find the strongest near-term cruxes: forecasting questions resolving by 2030 that [...]
Outline:
(02:13) Extended Executive Summary
(02:44) Methods
(03:53) Results: What drives (and doesn’t drive) disagreement over AI risk
(04:32) Hypothesis #1 - Disagreements about AI risk persist due to lack of engagement among participants, low quality of participants, or because the skeptic and concerned groups did not understand each others arguments
(05:11) Hypothesis #2 - Disagreements about AI risk are explained by different short-term expectations (e.g. about AI capabilities, AI policy, or other factors that could be observed by 2030)
(07:53) Hypothesis #3 - Disagreements about AI risk are explained by different long-term expectations
(10:35) Hypothesis #4 - These groups have fundamental worldview disagreements that go beyond the discussion about AI
(11:31) Results: Forecasting methodology
(12:15) Broader scientific implications
(13:09) Directions for further research
The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
March 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/orhjaZ3AJMHzDzckZ/results-from-an-adversarial-collaboration-on-ai-risk-fri
Linkpost URL:
https://forecastingresearch.org/s/AIcollaboration.pdf
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Topic of the post: I list potential things to work on other than keeping AI under human control.
Motivation
The EA community has long been worried about AI safety. Most of the efforts going into AI safety are focused on making sure humans are able to control AI. Regardless of whether we succeed at this, I think there's a lot of additional value on the line.
First of all, if we succeed at keeping AI under human control, there are still a lot of things that can go wrong. My perception is that this has recently gotten more attention, for example here, here, here, and at least indirectly here (I haven’t read all these posts. and have chosen them to illustrate that others have made this point purely based on how easily I could find them). Why controlling AI doesn’t solve everything is not the main topic of this [...]
Outline:
(00:14) Motivation
(04:03) Other works and where this list fits in
(05:44) The list
(05:47) Making AI-powered humanity wiser, making AIs wiser
(06:35) More detailed definition
(08:15) Preparing AIs for reasoning about philosophically complex topics with high stakes
(09:25) Improve epistemics during an early AI period
(10:35) Metacognition for areas where it is better for you to avoid information
(13:26) Improve decision theoretical reasoning and anthropic beliefs
(17:34) Compatibility of earth-originating AI with other intelligent life
(19:16) More detailed definition
(20:55) How to make progress on this
(24:46) Surrogate goals and other Safe Pareto improvements
(25:54) More detailed definition
(27:28) How to make progress on this
(28:39) AI personality profiling and avoiding the worst AI personality traits
(30:20) How to make progress on this
(31:46) Avoiding harm from how we train AIs: Niceness, near miss, and sign flip
(32:10) More detailed definition
(35:07) How to make progress on this
(37:55) Reducing human malevolence
(38:32) How to make progress on this
(39:14) Hot take: I want more surveys
(40:35) Acknowledgements
First published:
March 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wE7KPnjZHBjxLKNno/ai-things-that-are-perhaps-as-important-as-human-controlled
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
How factory farmers block progress — and what we can do about it
Most people agree that farmed animals deserve better legal protections: 84% of Europeans, 61-80% of Americans, 70% of Brazilians, 51-66% of Chinese, and 52% of Indians agree with some version of that statement. Yet almost all farmed animals globally still lack even the most basic protections.
America has about five times more vegetarians than farmers — and many more omnivores who care about farm animals. Yet the farmers wield much more political power. Fully 89% of Europeans think it's important that animals not be kept in individual cages. Yet the European Commission just implicitly sided with the 8% who don’t by shelving [...]
First published:
February 28th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BvXkG3PLfdmvoECFb/this-is-why-we-can-t-have-nice-laws
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post shares our journey in starting an Effective Altruism (EA) charity/project focused on Mediterranean fish welfare, the challenges we faced, our key learnings, and the reasons behind our decision to conclude the project. Actual research results are published in a Literature review and article.
Key points
The key points of this post are summarized as follows:
- We launched a project with the goal of enhancing fish welfare in Mediterranean aquaculture.
- We chose to limit our project to gathering information and decided against continuing our advocacy efforts after our initial six months.
- Our strategy, which focused on farmer-friendly outreach, was not effective in engaging farmers.
- The rationale behind our decision is the recognition that existing organizations are already performing excellent work, and we believe that funders should support these established organizations instead of starting a new one.
- The support and resources from the Effective Altruism (EA) and [...]
Outline:
(00:24) Key points
(01:41) Personal/Project background
(02:52) Why work on Mediterranean fish welfare?
(06:46) Project plans and initial work
(10:32) Initial work
(13:12) Farmer outreach
(19:52) Wrapping up the project
(21:33) Other takeaways from starting a project
(23:48) Resources for launching a new charity
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
February 26th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z59wybc56FCAysrAe/how-we-started-our-own-ea-charity-and-why-we-decided-to-wrap
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Epistemic status: the stories here are all as true as possible from memory, but my memory is so so.
An AI made this This is going to be big
It's late Summer 2017. I am on a walk in the Mendip Hills. It's warm and sunny and the air feels fresh. With me are around 20 other people from the Effective Altruism London community. We’ve travelled west for a retreat to discuss how to help others more effectively with our donations and careers. As we cross cow field after cow field, I get talking to one of the people from the group I don’t know yet. He seems smart, and cheerful. He tells me that he is an AI researcher at Google DeepMind. He explains how he is thinking about how to make sure that any powerful AI system actually does what we want it to. I ask him if [...]
Outline:
(00:16) This is going to be big
(01:21) This is going to be bad
(02:44) It's a long way off though
(03:50) This is fine
(05:10) It's probably something else in your life
(06:15) No-one in my org puts money in their pension
(07:16) Doom-vibes
(08:45) Maths might help
(10:28) A problem shared is…
(12:36) Hope
First published:
February 16th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YScdhSQBhkxpfcF3t/no-one-in-my-org-puts-money-in-their-pension
Linkpost URL:
https://seekingtobejolly.substack.com/p/no-one-in-my-org-puts-money-in-their
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Open Philanthropy strives to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. To find the best opportunities to help others, we rely heavily on scientific and social scientific research.
In some cases, we would find it helpful to have more research in order to evaluate a particular grant or cause area. Below, we’ve listed a set of social scientific questions for which we are actively seeking more evidence.[1] We believe the answers to these questions have the potential to impact our grantmaking. (See also our list of research topics for animal welfare.)
If you know of any research that touches on these questions, we would welcome hearing from you. At this point, we are not actively making grants to further investigate these questions. It is possible we may do so in the future, though, so if you plan to research any of these, please [...]
Outline:
(00:59) Land Use Reform
(05:53) Health
(15:39) Migration
(17:21) Education
(19:27) Science and Metascience
(29:18) Global Development
(31:26) Other
The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
February 15th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Y7c7MXf3BzgruTWv/social-science-research-we-d-like-to-see-on-global-health
Linkpost URL:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/social-science-research-topics-for-global-health-and-wellbeing/
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Google cofounder Larry Page thinks superintelligent AI is “just the next step in evolution.” In fact, Page, who's worth about $120 billion, has reportedly argued that efforts to prevent AI-driven extinction and protect human consciousness are “speciesist” and “sentimental nonsense.”
In July, former Google DeepMind senior scientist Richard Sutton — one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, a major subfield of AI — said that the technology “could displace us from existence,” and that “we should not resist succession.” In a 2015 talk, Sutton said, suppose “everything fails” and AI “kill[s] us all”; he asked, “Is it so bad that humans are not the final form of intelligent life in the universe?”
This is how I begin the cover story for Jacobin's winter issue on AI. Some very influential people openly welcome an AI-driven future, even if humans aren’t part of it.
Whether you're new to the topic [...]
First published:
February 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pRAjLTQxWJJkygWwK/my-cover-story-in-jacobin-on-ai-capitalism-and-the-x-risk
Linkpost URL:
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/can-humanity-survive-ai
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A friend sent me on a lovely trip down memory lane last week. She forwarded me an email chain from 12 years ago in which we all pretended we left the EA community, and explained why. We were partly thinking through what might cause us to drift in order that we could do something to make that less likely, and partly joking around. It was a really nice reminder of how uncertain things felt back then, and how far we’ve come.
Although the emails hadn’t led us to take any specific actions, almost everyone on the thread was still devoting their time to helping others as much as they can. We’re also, for the most part, still supporting each other in doing so. Of the 10 or so people on there, for example, Niel Bowerman is now my boss - CEO of 80k. Will MacAskill and Toby Ord [...]
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
February 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zEMvHK9Qa4pczWbJg/on-being-an-ea-for-decades
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A lot of great projects have started in informal ways: a startup in someone's garage, or a scrappy project run by volunteers. Sometimes people jump into these and are happy they did so.
But I’ve also seen people caught off-guard by arrangements that weren’t what they expected, especially early in their careers. I’ve been there, when I was a new graduate interning at a religious center that came with room, board, and $200 a month. I remember my horror when my dentist checkup cost most of a month's income, or when I found out that my nine-month internship came with zero vacation days. It was an overall positive experience for me (after we worked out the vacation thing), but it's better to go in clear-eyed.
First, I’ve listed a bunch of things to consider. These are drawn from several different situations I’ve heard about, both inside and outside EA. [...]
Outline:
(01:11) Things to consider
(08:06) Advice from a few EAs
First published:
February 12th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RXFcmrf7E5fLhb43e/things-to-check-about-a-job-or-internship
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary
$8003.98 Charity Entrepreneurship
$5000 Insect Institute
$5000 Shrimp Welfare Project
$5000 Rethink Priorities
$5000 Animal Ethics
$1000 Wild Animal Initiative
Background
I think it's good to keep track of and explain donations. It creates a record to get better over time and gives others insights into how you donate.
I officially made $45000 in 2023. I earned some investment income from some other sources though this is hard to quantify. I also had some savings from previous years so don’t come away from this thinking that I gave such a substantial portion of my income. That said, I am still giving away a significant portion of my income this year. I think this is a good thing and hopefully, I can serve as an example to others to give away a significant portion of their income, even if it isn’t that high.
In total, I am giving [...]
First published:
February 11th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EkKYqeAy3ArupKuYn/my-donations-2023-marcus-abramovitch
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
If you enjoy this, please consider subscribing to my Substack.
Sam Altman has said he thinks that developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to human extinction, but OpenAI is trying to build it ASAP. Why?
The common story for how AI could overpower humanity involves an “intelligence explosion,” where an AI system becomes smart enough to further improve its capabilities, bootstrapping its way to superintelligence. Even without any kind of recursive self-improvement, some AI safety advocates argue that a large enough number of copies of a genuinely human-level AI system could pose serious problems for humanity. (I discuss this idea in more detail in my recent Jacobin cover story.)
Some people think the transition from human-level AI to superintelligence could happen in a matter of months, weeks, days, or even hours. The faster the takeoff, the more dangerous, the thinking goes.
Sam Altman, circa February 2023, agrees [...]
First published:
February 10th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vBjSyNNnmNtJvmdAg/sam-altman-s-chip-ambitions-undercut-openai-s-safety
Linkpost URL:
https://garrisonlovely.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-chip-ambitions-undercut
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It is with great sadness that we share with you the passing of our fellow community member and beloved friend Mathilde Danès, at age 29.
A dedicated EA, animal advocate, and children's rights supporter, Mathilde had discovered the effective altruism community in 2016-2017, and the farm animal advocacy movement not long after. In 2018, she co-founded a local EA chapter in Lille, where she then lived. Other notable accomplishments of hers, among the many altruistic actions she took, include catering for several animal advocacy and EA events in France between 2020 and 2023, as well as co-organizing the 2022 edition of the Estivales de la question animale, an annual French-speaking effective animal advocacy summit.
With steadfast sentientist and antinatalist beliefs, she was particularly dedicated to the idea of reducing suffering whenever possible. Over the course of her advocacy years, she strived to live her life in accordance with [...]
First published:
February 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CeCKGfDzYsrvhJPFa/mathilde-danes-1994-2024
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I'm posting this as part of the Forum's Benjamin Lay Day celebration — consider writing a reflection of your own! The “official dates” for this reflection are February 8 - 15 (but you can write about this topic whenever you want).
TL;DR: * Tragic beliefs are beliefs that make the world seem worse, and give us partial responsibility for it. These are beliefs such as: “insect suffering matters” or “people dying of preventable diseases could be saved by my donations”. * Sometimes, to do good, we need to accept tragic beliefs. * We need to find ways to stay open to these beliefs in a healthy way. I outline two approaches, pragmatism and righteousness, which help, but can both be carried to excess.
Why I ignored insects for so long
I’ve been trying not to think about insects for a while. My diet is vegan, and sometimes I think of myself as [...]
Outline:
(00:19) Why I ignored insects for so long
(02:42) What is a tragic belief?
(03:21) How can we open ourselves up to tragic beliefs?
(03:34) Opportunity framing, or pragmatism
(05:33) The joy in righteousness
The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
February 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dy5h9Ly8osZEiFkru/tragic-beliefs
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TLDR: Given Charity Entrepreneurship's recent scaling, we are changing our brand to call our extended ecosystem “Ambitious Impact (AIM).” Our new AIM umbrella brand will include the classic CE program as well as recent additional programs connected to grantmaking, research, and effective giving. We are also planning to launch new programs soon. We feel AIM being able to create onramps for other career paths (similar to what we have done for nonprofit entrepreneurship) is the most plausible way of doubling our impact.
A quick history of Charity Entrepreneurship
- Inspired by the early success of a few nonprofits identified by evaluators such as GiveWell, we decided to take a systematic approach to researching and then launching new impact-focused nonprofits (Charity Science Health, Fortify Health).
- After some initial successes, Charity Entrepreneurship was started in 2018 as a formal Incubation Program to get more field-leading charities started.
- 31 projects were founded [...]
Outline:
(00:43) A quick history of Charity Entrepreneurship
(02:00) What will AIM look like going forward
(03:25) Why we are launching AIM
First published:
February 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cpuFnLtppbsLKcbbq/ambitious-impact-aim-a-new-brand-for-charity
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Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay died exactly 265 years ago today (on February 8, 1759). I’m using the anniversary of his death to reflect on his life and invite you to join me by sharing your thoughts sometime this week.
Lay was a radical anti-slavery advocate and an important figure in the Quaker abolitionist movement. He's been described as a moral weirdo; besides viewing slavery as a great sin, he opposed the death penalty, was vegetarian, believed that men and women were equal in the eyes of God, and more. He didn’t hide his views and was known for his “guerrilla theater” protests, which included splashing fake blood on slave-owners and forcing people to step over him as they exited a meeting. Expulsion from various communities, ridicule for his beliefs or appearance (he had dwarfism), and the offended sensibilities of those around him didn’t seem to seriously slow him down.
[...]
Outline:
(01:37) Protests against slavery: shocking people into awareness
(05:55) Life
(10:57) Role in the broader abolition movement
(13:10) Concluding notes
The original text contained 13 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
February 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dM93vHvLTgpk8pLSX/celebrating-benjamin-lay-died-on-this-day-265-years-ago
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Chris Anderson, Head of TED, has just released a new book called Infectious Generosity, which has a whole chapter that encourages readers to take the Giving What We Can Pledge! He has also taken the Giving What We Can Pledge with the new wealth option to give the greater of 10% of income or 2.5% of wealth each year.
This inspiring book is a guide to making Infectious Generosity become a global movement to build a hopeful future. Chris offers a playbook for how to embark on our own generous acts and to use the Internet to give them self-replicating, potentially world-changing, impact.
Here's a quick excerpt from the book:
“The more I’ve thought about generosity, the impact it can have, and the joy it can bring, the more determined I’ve become that it be an absolute core part of my identity.
Jacqueline's work as a [...]
First published:
January 25th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FWbaqM5PaFfrfAxaS/gwwc-pledge-featured-in-new-book-from-head-of-ted-chris
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Charity Entrepreneurship is running a second edition of our Research Training Program (RTP) – a program designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions.
In this post, we discuss possible long-term career paths for researchers and a gap assessment of what skills people might want to prioritize to pursue those. This discussion may be helpful for people considering the RTP program or those more generally wanting to find other ways of building career capital in research.
These five roles are based on what we think are potential placements or jobs for our first cohort in the RTP. We have made these all a bit more clichéd and separate than they are – in practice, there is a lot of overlap and nuance among them, and a successful research career often involves aspects from all these role [...]
Outline:
(01:41) Role: Monitoring and Evaluation (MandE) for a High-Impact Organization
(04:01) Role: Researcher in a Grantmaking Role / for a Foundation
(05:40) Role: Charity Evaluation Staff
(07:10) Role: Direct Research (such as academic, think tank, or EA meta)
(08:50) Role: Charity Founding (example: CE Incubation Program)
First published:
January 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EyedeQmoXGWbKRoxh/5-possibly-impactful-career-paths-for-researchers
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- I investigate the rates of criminal misconduct amongst people who have taken The Giving Pledge (roughly: ~200 [non-EA] billionaires who have pledged to give most of their money to charity).
- I find that rates are fairly high:
- 25% of signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted[1]
- 4% of signatories have spent at least one day in prison
- Overall, 41% of signatories have had at least one allegation of substantial misconduct (financial, sexual, or otherwise)
- I estimate that Giving Pledgers are not less likely, and possibly more likely, to commit financial crimes than YCombinator entrepreneurs.
- I am unable to find evidence of The Giving Pledge doing anything to limit the risk of criminal behavior amongst its members.
- I conclude that the rate of criminal behavior amongst major philanthropists is high, which means that we should not expect altruism to substantially lower the risks compared to that of [...]
Outline:
(01:22) Methodology
(02:01) How well do convictions correspond with immoral behavior?
(03:56) Some Representative Cases
(04:08) Are Giving Pledge signatories less likely to commit financial crimes?
(06:05) Giving Pledge's Response to Criminal Behavior
(07:08) PR Impacts
(08:15) Implications for EA
The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
January 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/d8nW46LrTkCWdjiYd/rates-of-criminality-amongst-giving-pledge-signatories
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
(Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.
This essay is part of a series that I'm calling "Otherness and controlin the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essay can be readfairly well on their own, but seeherefor brief summaries of the essays that have been released thus far.)
Earlier in thisseries,I discussed a certain kind of concern about the AI alignment discourse – namely, that it aspires to exert an inappropriate degree of controlover the values that guide the future. In considering this concern, Ithink it's important to bear in mind the aspects of our own valuesthat are specifically focused on pluralism, tolerance, helpfulness, andinclusivity towards values different-from-our-own (I discussed these inthe lastessay).But I don't think this is enough, on its own [...]
Outline:
(01:03) Tyrants and poultry-keepers
(12:29) Are we the conditioners?
(17:50) Lewiss argument in a moral realist world
(23:16) What if the Tao isnt a thing, though?
(32:02) Even without the Tao, shaping the futures values need not be tyranny
(35:13) Freedom in a naturalistic world
(41:53) Does treating values as natural make them natural?
(47:04) Naturalists who still value stuff
(53:23) What should the conditioners actually do, though?
(56:51) On not-brain-washing
(01:04:15) On influencing the values of not-yet-existing agents
The original text contained 37 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
January 18th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EHL9QJaEwHxNJXaNW/on-the-abolition-of-man
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Should we seek to make our scientific institutions more effective? On the one hand, rising material prosperity has so far been largely attributable to scientific and technological progress. On the other hand, new scientific capabilities also expand our powers to cause harm. Last year I wrote a report on this issue, “The Returns to Science in the Presence of Technological Risks.” The report focuses specifically on the net social impact of science when we take into account the potential abuses of new biotechnology capabilities, in addition to benefits to health and income.
The main idea of the report is to develop an economic modeling framework that lets us tally up the benefits of science and weigh them against future costs. To model costs, I start with the assumption that, at some future point, a “time of perils” commences, wherein new scientific capabilities can be abused and lead to an [...]
First published:
January 17th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PArvxhBaZJrGAuhZp/report-on-the-desirability-of-science-given-new-biotech
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Crossposted from Twitter.
As the year comes to an end, we want to highlight and celebrate some of the incredible achievements from in and around the effective altruism ecosystem this year.
- A new malaria vaccine
The World Health Organization recommended its second-ever malaria vaccine this year: R21/Matrix-M, designed to protect babies and young children from malaria. The drug's recently concluded Phase III trial, which was co-funded by Open Philanthropy, found that the vaccine was between 68-75% effective at targeting the disease, which kills around 600,000 people (mainly children) each year.
The work didn’t stop there, though. Following advocacy from many people — including Zacharia Kafuko of 1 Day Sooner — the WHO quickly prequalified the vaccine, laying the groundwork for an expedited deployment and potentially saving hundreds of thousands of children's lives. 1 Day Sooner is now working to raise money to expedite the deployment further.
- The [...]
First published:
December 31st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8P2GZFLnv8HW9ozLB/ea-wins-2023
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Crossposted from AI Impacts blog
The 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI is out, this time with 2778 participants from six top AI venues (up from about 700 and two in the 2022 ESPAI), making it probably the biggest ever survey of AI researchers.
People answered in October, an eventful fourteen months after the 2022 survey, which had mostly identical questions for comparison.
Here is the preprint. And here are six interesting bits in pictures (with figure numbers matching paper, for ease of learning more):
- Expected time to human-level performance dropped 1-5 decades since the 2022 survey. As always, our questions about ‘high level machine intelligence’ (HLMI) and ‘full automation of labor’ (FAOL) got very different answers, and individuals disagreed a lot (shown as thin lines below), but the aggregate forecasts for both sets of questions dropped sharply. For context, between 2016 and 2022 surveys, the forecast [...]
First published:
January 6th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/M9MSe4KHNv4HNf44f/survey-of-2-778-ai-authors-six-parts-in-pictures
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We, on behalf of the EV US and EV UK boards, are very glad to share that Zach Robinson has been selected as the new CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA).
We can personally attest to his exceptional leadership, judgement, and dedication from having worked with him at Effective Ventures US. These experiences are part of why we unanimously agreed with the hiring committee's recommendation to offer him the position.[1] We think Zach has the skills and the drive to lead CEA's very important work.
We are grateful to the search committee (Max Dalton, Claire Zabel, and Michelle Hutchinson) for their thorough process in making the recommendation. They considered hundreds of potential internal and external candidates, including through dozens of blinded work tests. For further details on the search process, please see this Forum post.
As we look forward, we are excited about CEA's future with [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 28th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/R6qu7LhcLKLob7t9r/zach-robinson-will-be-cea-s-next-ceo
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I'm only 30% sure [Edit Jan 7: 90% sure] that this is actually an inadequacy made by those whose job it is to maximize donations but I’ve noticed that none of the donations pages of GiveWell, Giving What We Can, Horizon Institute, or METR have this little tab in them that MIRI has (just scroll down after following the link):
This little tool comes from doublethedonation.com.
I was looking for charities to donate to, and I’m grateful I stumbled upon the MIRI donation page because otherwise I would not have known that Google would literally double my donation. None of the other donation pages except MIRI had this little “does your company do employer matching?” box. WHY.
I would wager other tech companies have similar programs, and that a good chunk of EA donations come from employees of those tech companies, and that thousands of dollars a year [...]
First published:
January 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fbTE2cBtnxCqemWNp/double-the-donation-ea-inadequacy-found
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
There was a recent post about economic growth & effective altruism by Karthik Tadepalli. He pointed out that a lot of people agree that economic growth is important, but it hasn't really led to many suggestions for specific interventions.
I thought it would be good to get the ball rolling[1] by asking a few people what they think are good donation opportunities in this area, or if not, do they think this area is neglected when you have governments, development banks, investors etc all focused on growth.
I'm hoping there will be more in depth research into this in 2024 to see whether there are opportunities for smaller/medium funders, and how competitive it is with the best global health interventions.
I have fleshed out a few of the shorter responses with more details on what the suggested organisation does.
Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center):
- XKDR Forum - Founded by [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
January 8th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oTuNw6MqXxhDK3Mdz/economic-growth-donation-suggestions-and-ideas
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Much attention recently has focused on far-UVC light, part of the spectrum of germicidal UV (GUV), and its promise for pandemic prevention. In the following medium investigation, we examine different kinds of GUV, their strengths, weaknesses, and crucial considerations in the real-world deployment of these interventions.
Throughout the report, we emphasize four points that we believe have been lost in some public discussions of far-UVC:
- A great deal of uncertainty remains around far-UVC interventions, to the point that we remain uncertain over the relative cost-effectiveness, all things considered, of far-UVC light versus conventional (~254nm) GUV in many settings.
- Cost-effectiveness depends on deployment context, including the dimensions of rooms, installation type (upper-room, full-room, etc.) assumptions about the mixing of air, etc. Combined with certain physical facts about air and light (e.g. the inverse square law), this complicates strong claims about far-UVC's promise.
- GUV of any kind will not [...]
Outline:
(02:39) Medium Investigation: Germicidal Ultraviolet Light and Disease Transmission Reduction
(10:30) Key Terms and Abbreviations
(13:12) Importance: Why Biological Indoor Air Quality Matters
(17:23) Current status of indoor air quality in the US
(20:22) What is GUV?
(22:49) Full-Room Systems
(23:45) Far-UVC Light
(24:41) Upper-Room GUV
(25:27) In-Duct GUV
(26:42) Benefits of GUV as a biosecurity intervention
(30:24) What do we know about the safety of far-UVC light?
(31:14) Primary Concerns: Skin and Eye Damage
(36:13) Additional Safety Concerns
(36:17) Ozone Production
(37:28) Indoor Air Pollution
(41:08) Skin Microbiome
(42:12) Overall view on safety
(44:10) Additional Risks
(44:14) Public Reaction Considerations
(47:17) Dual-Use Potential and Security Risks
(50:18) Resistance risks
(52:01) Damage to Plastics and Other Materials
(54:47) Comparing Different Types of GUV
(56:08) Is far-UVC technology overhyped?
(59:42) The Complexity of Comparing Different GUV Systems and Wavelengths
(01:04:41) Efficacy
(01:07:35) The Challenges of Studying Real-World GUV Effectiveness
(01:16:53) Safety
(01:17:02) Skin/Eye Effects
(01:18:39) Indoor Air Pollution
(01:19:06) Cost
(01:21:31) Limits to real-world use
(01:23:30) Additional benefits
(01:24:07) Overall View
(01:26:06) Neglectedness
(01:32:11) What Could a Philanthropist Do?
(01:33:29) Grantmaking under Uncertainty: Impact Multipliers for GUV
(01:36:52) Placing Wavelength-Agnostic Bets
(01:41:28) Leveraging Societal Resources Via Advocacy
(01:42:42) Prioritizing shaping RandD incentives over funding specific RandD
(01:44:14) Focusing on high-income countries first
(01:45:37) Focusing on good information over rapid deployment
(01:50:32) Potential funding pathways
(01:55:48) Conclusions and Next Steps
(01:57:03) About Founders Pledge
The original text contained 157 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
January 9th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EZZveBtxoZJjSighP/are-far-uvc-interventions-overhyped-founders-pledge
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This podcast is an Ask Me Anything with Rob Mather, Founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation, hosted by Toby Tremlett, the EA Forum’s Content Manager.
If you’re interested in Effective Altruism, you’ve probably heard of Rob Mather’s charity, the Against Malaria Foundation. For almost two decades, they’ve been doing crucial work to protect people, especially children, from Malaria.
To date, around 450 million people have been protected with malaria bed nets from this charity. Once all of their currently funded nets have been distributed, AMF estimates it will have prevented 185,000 deaths. And it’s not just AMF saying this, they’ve been a GiveWell Top Charity since 2009.
Listen to this episode to find out more about how Rob ended up starting one of the most effective global health charities, Rob’s tips for running a charity, how AMF’s work integrates with other NGOs that work on Malaria, and much more.
The original AMA post, which features Forum user’s questions for Rob, more information about AMF, and a link to a transcript for this episode, can be found here.
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rWRSvRxAco2bLoXKr/podcast-transcript-ama-founder-and-ceo-of-the-against
Published for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
As we announced back in October, I have taken on the senior leadership role at MIRI as its CEO. It's a big pair of shoes to fill, and an awesome responsibility that I’m honored to take on.
There have been several changes at MIRI since our 2020 strategic update, so let's get into it.[1]
The short version:
We think it's very unlikely that the AI alignment field will be able to make progress quickly enough to prevent human extinction and the loss of the future's potential value, that we expect will result from loss of control to smarter-than-human AI systems.
However, developments this past year like the release of ChatGPT seem to have shifted the Overton window in a lot of groups. There's been a lot more discussion of extinction risk from AI, including among policymakers, and the discussion quality seems greatly improved.
This provides a glimmer of hope. [...]
Outline:
(03:27) MIRI's mission
(05:47) MIRI in 2021–2022
(10:10) New developments in 2023
(13:03) Looking forward
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
January 5th, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Lvd2DFaHKfuveaCyQ/miri-2024-mission-and-strategy-update
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A summary of the Nonlinear situation from a third-person perspective, by Ozy Brennan. I find it to be thoughtful, well-written, and well-researched enough to be part of the conversation. It was also posted on LessWrong.
Edit: full text included below (with permission from the author). I had to reformat a lot so assume all formatting errors are done by me.
About a week ago, I became one of a small, elite group—people who have read every single goddamn word of Nonlinear's Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims. I read the appendix. I read the appendixes to the appendix. I have spent more time thinking about whether a complete stranger got a vegan burger than any person should.
If you just want to make up your own mind, I suggest reading The General Situation and referring to Dramatis Personae when you get confused who is who. If you like drama [...]
Outline:
(02:00) How We Got Here
(03:46) Dramatis Personae
(05:20) Ben's Credibility
(07:39) Kat Woods's Credibility
(11:30) The General Situation
(12:59) Enmeshment
(17:44) Finances
(23:22) Isolation
(25:17) The Drug Situation
(27:34) Specific Situations
(27:37) The Vegan Burger Situation
(29:21) The Driving Situation
(31:21) Speculation About Drugs
(32:42) Alice's Credibility
(36:09) The Saga of Alice's Incubated Organization
(41:58) The Saga of Emerson Spartz's Previous Business Life
(45:14) Could Nonlinear Employ People?
(48:50) Takeaways
The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
January 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RdiQ3n8cFJBxHRnwu/practically-a-book-review-appendix-to-nonlinear-s-evidence-1
Linkpost URL:
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/practically-a-book-review-appendix
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I think many EAs have a unique view about how one altruistic action affects the next altruistic action, something like altruism is powerful in terms of its impact, and altruistic acts take time/energy/willpower; thus, it's better to conserve your resources for these topmost important altruistic actions (e.g., career choice) and not sweat it the other actions.
However, I think this is a pretty simplified and incorrect model that leads to the wrong choices being taken. I wholeheartedly agree that certain actions constitute a huge % of your impact. In my case, I do expect my career/job (currently running Charity Entrepreneurship) will be more than 90% of my lifetime impact. But I have a different view on what this means for altruism outside of career choices. I think that being altruistic in other actions not only does not decrease my altruism on the big choices but actually galvanizes them and [...]
First published:
December 26th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DBcDZJhTDgig9QNHR/altruism-sharpens-altruism
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a crosspost for A year of wins for farmed animals, published by Lewis Bollard on 14 December 2023 in Open Philanthropy farm animal welfare research newsletter.
It's been a tough year for farmed animals. The European Union shelved the world's most ambitious farm animal welfare reform proposal, plant-based meat sales sagged, and the media panned cultivated meat while Italy banned it. But advocates for factory farmed animals still won major gains — here are ten of the biggest:
- Wins for the winged. Advocates won 130 new corporate pledges to eliminate cages for hens or the worst abuses of broiler chickens. This progress has now expanded well beyond the West: recent wins include cage-free pledges from the largest Asian restaurant company and the largest Indonesian retailer. That's mostly thanks to the work of the 100+ member groups of the Open Wing Alliance, who now campaign across 67 [...]
First published:
December 24th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aiXyEvheFdwsEoPeC/a-year-of-wins-for-farmed-animals
Linkpost URL:
https://farmanimalwelfare.substack.com/p/a-year-of-wins-for-farmed-animals
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TL;DR: We ran a Donation Election in which 341 Forum users[1] voted on how we should allocate the Donation Election Fund ($34,856[2]). The winners are:
- Rethink Priorities - $12,847.75
- Charity Entrepreneurship: Incubated Charities Fund - $11,351.11
- Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds) - $10,657.07
This post shares more information about the results:
- Comments from voters about their votes: patterns include referencing organizations' marginal funding posts, updating towards the neglectedness of animal welfare, appreciating strong track records, etc.
- Voting patterns: most people voted for 2-4 candidates (at least one of which was one of the three winners), usually in multiple cause areas
- Cause area stats: similar numbers of points went to cross-cause, animal welfare, risk/future-oriented, and global health candidates (ranked in that order)
- All candidate results, including raw point[3] totals: the Long-Term Future Fund initially placed second by raw point totals
- Concluding thoughts & other charities
You can [...]
The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 24th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7D83kwkyaHLQSo6JT/winners-in-the-forum-s-donation-election-2023
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary.
In the past year, public fora have seen growing concern about existential risk (henceforth, x-risk) from AI. The thought is that we could see transformative AI in the coming years or decades, that it may be hard to ensure that such systems act with humanity's best interests in mind and that those highly advanced AIs may be able to overpower us if they aimed to do so, or otherwise that such systems may be catastrophically misused. Some have reacted by arguing that concerns about x-risk distract from current harms from AI, like algorithmic bias, job displacement and labour issues, environmental impact and so on. And in opposition to those voices, others have argued that attention on x-risk does not draw resources and attention away from current harms -- that both concerns can coexist peacefully.
The claim that x-risk distracts from current harms is contingent. It may be [...]
Outline:
(02:15) The Argument
(09:31) Evidence
(10:46) AI Policy
(14:33) Search Interest
(19:40) Twitter/X Followers
(20:55) Funding
(22:20) Climate Change
(25:39) Maybe the Real Disagreement Is about How Big the Risks Are
The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 21st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hXzB72kfdAk6PTzio/attention-on-existential-risk-from-ai-likely-hasn-t
Linkpost URL:
https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/attention-on-existential-risk-from-ai-likely-hasnt-distracted-from-current-harms-from-ai/
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Huge thanks to Konrad Seifert, Marcel Steimke, Ysaline Bourgine, Milena Canzler, Alex Rahl-Kaplan, Marieke de Visscher, and Guillaume Vorreux for the valuable feedback provided on drafts of this post, and to many others for the conversations that lead to me writing it.
Views & mistakes are my own.
TL;DR
Being a non-native English speaker makes one sound less convincing. However, poor inclusion of non-native English speakers means missed perspectives in decision-making. Hence, it's a vicious circle where lack of diversity persists: native English culture prevails at the thought leadership level and neglects other cultures by failing to acknowledge that it is inherently harder to stand out as a non-native English speaker.
Why I am writing this
I’m co-directing EA Switzerland (I’m originally from France), and I’ve been thinking about the following points for some time. I’ve been invited to speak at the Panel on Community Building at EAG Boston [...]
Outline:
(00:25) TL;DR
(00:52) Why I am writing this
(01:38) An unconscious bias against non-native English speakers
(02:00) Non-native English speakers sound less convincing
(03:43) Poor inclusion of non-native English speakers means missed perspectives
(04:30) Native English speakers are overrepresented in EA's thought leadership: a vicious circle
(05:47) What can we do about it?
(05:50) Some prompts
(06:35) Let's talk about this
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 20th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/F7qzoWhiCTK8KpuTM/the-privilege-of-native-english-speakers-in-reaching-high
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I tend to disagree with most EAs about existential risk from AI. Unfortunately, my disagreements are all over the place. It's not that I disagree with one or two key points: there are many elements of the standard argument that I diverge from, and depending on the audience, I don't know which points of disagreement people think are most important.
I want to write a post highlighting all the important areas where I disagree, and offering my own counterarguments as an alternative. This post would benefit from responding to an existing piece, along the same lines as Quintin Pope's article "My Objections to "We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky"". By contrast, it would be intended to address the EA community as a whole, since I'm aware many EAs already disagree with Yudkowsky even if they buy the basic arguments for AI x-risks.
My question is: what is the [...]
First published:
December 15th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DHybAfxPhqqYa3bQz/what-is-the-current-most-representative-ea-ai-x-risk
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The New York Times
Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek's Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they'd heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase "HBD" is muttered, but it's nobody's birthday.
A few days before publication, they present key claims to the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), who furiously tell them that many of the claims are provably false and ask for a brief delay to demonstrate the falsehood of [...]
Outline:
(00:06) The New York Times
(03:08) A Word of Introduction
(07:35) The Story So Far: A Recap
(11:08) Avoidable, Unambiguous Falsehoods in Sharing Information About Nonlinear
(21:32) These Issues Were Known and Knowable By Lightcone and the Community. The EA/LW Community Dismissed Them
(27:03) Better processes are both possible and necessary
(38:44) On Lawsuits
(47:15) First Principles, Duty, and Harm
(50:43) What of Nonlinear?
The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 19th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bwtpBFQXKaGxuic6Q/effective-aspersions-how-the-nonlinear-investigation-went
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I’ve been working in animal advocacy for two years and have an amateur interest in AI. All corrections, points of disagreement, and other constructive feedback are very welcome. I’m writing this in a personal capacity, and am not representing the views of my employer.
Many thanks to everyone who provided feedback and ideas.
Introduction.
In a previous post, I set out some of the positive and negative impacts that AI could have on animals. The present post sets out a few ideas for what an animal-inclusive AI landscape might look like: what efforts would we need to see from different actors in order for AI to be beneficial for animals? This is just a list of high-level suggestions, and I haven’t tried to prioritize them, explore them in detail, or suggest practical ways to bring them about. I also haven’t touched on the (potentially extremely [...]
Outline:
(01:23) Why do we need animal-inclusive AI?
(03:44) Moving towards animal-inclusive AI
(03:49) Explicitly mention animals in non-binding commitments
(03:54) Governmental commitments
(06:48) Company commitments
(08:32) Representation of animals in AI decision-making
(10:33) Tangible actions by companies
(14:12) Explicitly mention animals in binding commitments
(21:10) Publish more research on AI's potential impacts on animals
(23:55) Build up the ‘AI safety x animal advocacy’ community
(29:44) Conclusion
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 18th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2cZAzvaQefh5JxWdb/bringing-about-animal-inclusive-ai
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Giving What We Can (GWWC) is embarking on an exciting new chapter: after years of support, we will be spinning out of the Effective Ventures Foundation UK and US (collectively referred to as “EV”), our parent charities in the US and UK respectively, to become an independent organisation.
Rest assured that our core mission, commitments, and focus on effective giving remain unchanged. We believe this transition will allow us to better serve our community and to achieve our mission more effectively. Below, you'll find all the details you need, including what is changing, what isn't, and how you can get involved.
A heartfelt thanks
First and foremost, we owe a very big thank you to the team at EV. Their support over the years has helped us to grow and have a meaningful impact in the world. We could not be more grateful for their support.
A big thank [...]
Outline:
(00:41) A heartfelt thanks
(01:08) Why spin out?
(02:36) The details
(02:55) Whats changing
(04:03) Whats not changing
(04:51) How you can help
(05:09) Have more questions?
First published:
December 13th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ngoqSAbcdYhhNgBza/gwwc-is-spinning-out-of-ev
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We’re announcing two updates today that we believe will strengthen the effective altruism ecosystem.
FTX updates
First, we’re pleased to say that both Effective Ventures UK and Effective Ventures US have agreed to settlements with the FTX bankruptcy estate. As part of these settlements, EV US and EV UK (which I’ll collectively refer to as “EV”) have between them paid the estate $26,786,503, an amount equal to 100% of the funds the entities received from FTX and the FTX Foundation (which I’ll collectively refer to as “FTX”) in 2022. All of this money was either originally received from FTX or allocated to pay the settlement with the knowledge and support of their original donor. This means that EV's projects can continue to fundraise with confidence that donations won’t be used to cover the cost of this settlement. We strongly condemn fraud and the actions underlying Sam Bankman-Fried's conviction.
Also [...]
Outline:
(00:12) FTX updates
(02:59) Future of EV
First published:
December 13th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjsfHwqasyQMWRzZN/ev-updates-ftx-settlement-and-the-future-of-ev
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Recently, Ben Pace wrote a well-intentioned blog post mostly based on complaints from 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees who 1) wanted more money, 2) felt socially isolated, and 3) felt persecuted/oppressed.
Of relevance, one has accused the majority of her previous employers, and 28 people of abuse - that we know of.
She has accused multiple people of threatening to kill her and literally accused an ex-employer of murder. Within three weeks of joining us, she had accused five separate people of abuse: not paying her what was promised, controlling her romantic life, hiring stalkers, and other forms of persecution.
We have empathy for her. Initially, we believed her too. We spent weeks helping her get her “nefarious employer to finally pay her” and commiserated with her over how badly they mistreated her.
Then she started accusing us of strange things.
You’ve seen Ben's evidence, which [...]
Outline:
(02:20) Short summary overview table
(04:04) This post is long, so if you read just one illustrative story, read this one
(08:37) What is going on? Why did they say so many misleading things? How did Ben get so much wrong?
(12:14) Ben admitted in his post that he was warned in private by multiple of his own sources that Alice was untrustworthy and told outright lies. One credible person told Ben Alice makes things up.
(20:35) Alice has similarities to Kathy Forth, who, according to Scott Alexander, was “a very disturbed person” who, multiple people told him, “had a habit of accusing men she met of sexual harassment. They all agreed she wasnt malicious, just delusional.” As a community, we do not have good mechanisms in place to protect people from false accusations.
(23:41) Why didn’t Ben do basic fact-checking to see if their claims were true? I mean, multiple people warned him?
(24:42) Longer summary table
(26:14) To many EAs, this would have been a dream job
(37:13) Sharing Information on Ben Pace
(47:07) So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?
(51:22) Conclusion: a story with no villains
(57:16) If you are disturbed by what happened here, here are some ways you can help
(58:53) Acknowledgments
First published:
December 12th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H4DYehKLxZ5NpQdBC/nonlinear-s-evidence-debunking-false-and-misleading-claims
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary:
International funding and coordination to tackle HIV/AIDS and support health systems in lower- and middle-income countries, is at risk of not being renewed by US Congress, due to demands that it should be linked to new abortion-related restrictions in recipient countries.
This program is estimated to have saved over 20 million lives since it was launched by the Bush Administration in 2003, and even now averts over a million HIV/AIDS deaths annually.
Since it has also helped support health systems in LMICs, and tackle malaria and tuberculosis, its impact is likely greater than this.
In my view this is the most important risk to global health we face today, and I think it isn't getting enough attention.
If anyone is interested in research, writing or advocacy on this issue, please do so. Or please get in touch if you are interested in jointly working on this [...]
First published:
December 10th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gF4nLBpjgFe6XTMrM/pepfar-one-of-the-most-life-saving-global-health-programs-is
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Epistemic Status: I've researched this broad topic for a couple of years. I've read about 30+ books and 100+ articles on the topic so far (I'm not really keeping count). I've also read many other works in the related areas of normative moral philosophy, moral psychology, moral epistemology, moral methodology, and metaethics, since it's basically my area of specialization within philosophy. This project will be my PhD thesis. However, I still have 3 years of the PhD to go, so a substantial amount of my opinions on the matter are subject to changes.
Disclaimer: I have received some funding as a Forethought Foundation Fellow in support of my PhD research. But all the opinions expressed here are my own.
Index.
Part I - Bibliography Review
Part II - Preliminary Takes and Opinions (I'm writing it, coming very soon!)
More parts to be published later on.
Introduction.
Hi everyone, this [...]
Outline:
(00:51) Index.
(01:05) Introduction.
(03:55) Guiding Questions.
(08:33) Who has a good Personal Fit for becoming a Moral Progress researcher?
(15:05) Bibliography Review.
(15:32) TL;DR / Recommended Reading Order.
(17:05) Amazing books (5/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ - Read them and take notes)
(17:15) Allen Buchanan and Rachel Powell - The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory (2018) - Genre: Moral Philosophy - No Audiobook
(19:32) Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes (2011) - Genre: Historical Trends - Audiobook Available
(21:11) Hanno Sauer - Moral Teleology: A Theory of Progress (2023) - Genre: Moral Philosophy - No Audiobook
(22:07) Oded Galor - The Journey of Humanity (2020) - Genre: Historical Trends - Audiobook Available
(23:02) Joseph Henrichs - The Secret of Our Success (2016) - Genre: Cultural Evolution, Pre-History - Audiobook Available
(23:59) Joseph Henrich - The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020) - Genre: Cultural Evolution, Historical Trends since the 1300s - Audiobook Available
(26:51) Great books (4/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ - Read them)
(26:59) Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell - A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made Us Human (2022) - Genre: Moral Psychology, Moral Philosophy - Audiobook Available
(27:40) Philip Kitcher - Moral Progress (2021) - Genre: Moral Philosophy, Social Movements - No Audiobook
(30:22) Hans Rosling - Factfulness: Ten Reasons Were Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (2018) - Genre: Post-Industrial Historical Trends. - Audiobook Available
(31:10) Michael Tomasello - Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (2018)- Genre: Cognitive Human Development - No Audiobook
(32:03) Jose Antonio Marina - Biography of Inhumanity (2021) - Genre: Moral Values, Cultural Evolution - Audiobook in Spanish only
(32:32) Kim Sterelnys - The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (2009) - Genre: Human Pre-History - Audiobook Available
(33:25) Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind (2011) - Genre: Political Psychology - Audiobook Available
(34:52) Okay books (3/5 ⭐⭐⭐ - Skim them)
(34:59) Peter Singer - The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (1979 [2011]) - Genre: Moral Philosophy - No Audiobook
(36:19) Frans de Waal - Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (2006) - Genre: Ape Proto-Morality - No Audiobook
(37:00) Robert Wright - Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (2000) - Genre: Cultural Evolution - Audiobook Available
(37:51) Joshua Greene - Moral Tribes. Emotion, Reason, and the gap between Us and Them (2013) - Genre: Moral Psychology - Audiobook Available
(38:48) Derek Parfit - On What Matters (2011) (just the section on the Triple Theory) - Genre: Moral Philosophy - No Audiobook
(39:28) Steven Pinker - Enlightenment Now. The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) - Genre: Social Values / Enlightenment Values - Audiobook Available
(40:15) Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983) - Genre: Modernity - No Audiobook
(41:26) William MacAskill - Moral Uncertainty (2020) - Genre: Moral Philosophy - No Audiobook
(42:01) Daniel Dennett - Darwins Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995) - Genre: Evolution - Audiobook Available
(42:52) Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu - Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (2012) - Genre: Transhumanism, Human Nature - No Audiobook
(43:25) Isaiah Berlin - The Roots of Romanticism (1965) - Genre: Romantic Values, Nationalism - No Audiobook
(44:06) Mediocre books (2/5 ⭐⭐ - Skip to the relevant sections)
(44:13) Kwame Anthony Appiah - The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010) - Genre: Moral Philosophy, Social Movements - Audiobook Available
(46:13) Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate (2000) - Genre: General Psychology - Audiobook Available
(47:10) Cecilia Heyes - Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking (2018) - Genre: Cultural Evolution, Psychology - Audiobook Available
(48:11) Cass Sunstein - How Change Happens (2019) - Genre: Social Change, Policy - Audiobook Available
(48:44) Angus Deaton - The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013) - Genre: Trends in Global Poverty, Health - Audiobook Available
(49:09) Johan Norberg - Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (2016) - Genre: Post-Industrial Historical Trends - Audiobook Available
(49:39) David Livingstone Smith - On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (2020) - Genre: - Audiobook Available
(50:18) Bad books (1/5 ⭐ - Skip)
(50:23) Michael Shermer - The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People (2015) - Genre: Enlightenment Values - Audiobook Available
(50:51) Michele Moody-Adams - Genre: Social Movements, Moral Philosophy - Making Space for Justice (2023) - Audiobook Available
(51:21) Thomas Piketty - A Brief History of Equality (2021) - Genre: Historical Trends - Audiobook Available
(51:44) Article collection.
(52:08) Worthwhile articles (Read them).
(52:55) Alright ones (Skim them).
(01:03:29) Bad ones (Skip them).
(01:03:55) Havent read them yet or dont remember enough to classify them.
(01:05:31) Books I havent read yet, and my reasoning for why I want to read them.
(01:05:37) Important books or articles I havent read yet.
(01:07:13) Books or articles I havent read yet. I might read them but I consider less directly relevant or less pressing.
(01:09:56) Minor readings I might do when I have free time (e.g. over the summer just to corroborate if Im missing anything important in my own work):
(01:10:58) Potentially interesting extensions but probably beyond the scope of my work.
(01:13:13) EA work on Moral Progress and related topics.
(01:13:29) Moral Circle Expansion.
(01:15:12) Economic Growth and Moral Progress.
(01:15:31) Progress Studies.
(01:16:22) Social and Intellectual Movements.
(01:16:58) Historical Processes.
(01:17:16) Cultural Evolution and Value Drift.
(01:18:37) Longtermist Institutional Reform.
(01:19:17) Conclusion.
(01:19:46) Acknowledgements.
(01:20:05) Contact Information.
First published:
December 10th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YC3Mvw2xNtpKxR5sK/phd-on-moral-progress-bibliography-review
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary of findings 2 years in:
- A monthly universal basic income (UBI) empowered recipients and did not create idleness. They invested, became more entrepreneurial, and earned more. The common concern of “laziness” never materialized, as recipients did not work less nor drink more.
- Both a large lump sum and a long-term UBI proved highly effective. The lump sum enabled big investments and the guarantee of 12 years of UBI encouraged savings and risk-taking.
- A short-term UBI was the least impactful of the designs but still effective. On nearly all important economic measures, a 2-year-only UBI performed less well than giving cash as a large lump sum or guaranteeing a long-term UBI, despite each group having received roughly the same total amount of money at this point. However, it still had a positive impact on most measures.
- Governments should consider changing how they deliver cash aid. Short-term monthly payments [...]
Outline:
(02:37) A monthly UBI made people in poverty more productive, not less
(03:57) Giving $500 as a lump sum improved economic outcomes more than giving it out over 24 months
(06:27) The promise of a long-term UBI encouraged saving and investment
(07:43) This research should inform how cash is given to people in extreme poverty
(10:28) Study design
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DBx98atdYFM3yKR9C/early-findings-from-the-world-s-largest-ubi-study
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I'm Ezra, CEO of EA Israel, but am writing this in a personal capacity. My goal in writing this is to give the community a sense of what someone from a decent-sized local EA group is going through during a time of national crisis. I'll try to keep the post relatively apolitical, but since this is such a charged topic, I'm not sure I'll succeed. I will say that I’m quite nervous about the responses to the post, since the forum can sometimes lean towards criticism. Ideally, I’d want people who are reading this to do so with a sense of compassion, while keeping in mind that this is a difficult time and difficult topic to post or share experiences about. I also don't want the comments to be a discussion of the war per se, but of the experiences of an EA during the war. Finally, I'm sure that [...]
Outline:
(01:25) So what have I been doing since the outbreak of the war?
(04:09) How has my experience changed the way I think about EA concepts?
(04:35) Donation recommendations
(05:39) Important aspects of suffering arent captured by usual metrics
(06:17) Theres even more moral uncertainty
(07:39) Caring about people far away can go wrong if the topic is trending
(08:44) Models of complex situations can be overly simplistic and harmful
(11:24) Optimisation is irrelevant
(12:59) Ambition to improve the world
(14:06) The importance of peace
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iXv6zjbAfwrpQy37B/ea-thoughts-from-israel-hamas-war
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary.
- EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF)[1] has historically had a somewhat scattershot focus within “EA meta.” This makes it difficult for us to know what to optimize for or for donors to evaluate our performance
- We propose that we switch towards focusing our grantmaking on Principles-First EA[2]
- This includes supporting:
- research that aids prioritization across different cause areas
- projects that build communities focused on impartial, scope sensitive and ambitious altruism
- infrastructure, especially epistemic infrastructure, to support these aims
- We hope that the tighter focus area will make it easier for donors and community members to evaluate the EA Infrastructure Fund, and decide for themselves whether EAIF is a good fit to donate to or otherwise support
- Our tentative plan is to collect feedback from the community, donors, and stakeholders until the end of this year. Early 2024 will focus on refining our approach and helping ease transition for grantees. We'll begin piloting our new vision in Q2 2024.
Introduction and background [...]
Outline:
(01:17) Introduction and background context
(04:29) Proposal
(05:10) Examples of projects under the new EAIF's purview
(06:01) Examples of projects that are outside of the updated scope
(06:46) Why focus on Principles-First EA?
(08:43) Potential Metrics
(10:05) Potential Alternatives for Donors and Grantees
(10:52) Tentative Timeline
(11:46) Appendices
(11:53) Examples of projects that I (Caleb) would be excited for this fund to support
(13:00) Scope Assessment of Hypothetical EAIF Applications
(15:53) Key Considerations
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FnNJfgLgsHdjuMvzH/ea-infrastructure-fund-s-plan-to-focus-on-principles-first
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Charity Entrepreneurship in collaboration with Giving What We Can is opening a new program to launch 4-6 new Effective Giving Initiatives (EGIs) in 2024. We expect them to raise millions in counterfactual funding for highly impactful charities, even in their first few years.
[Applications are open now]
In recent years Doneer Effectief, Effektiv Spenden & Giving What We Can have moved huge sums of money ($1.4m, $35m and $330m, respectively) to the best charities globally. We aim to build on their experience and success by launching new EGIs in highly promising locations. These initiatives can be fully independent or run in collaboration with existing organizations, depending on what is most impactful. We’ll provide the training, the blueprints, and the all-important seed funding.
This 8-week full-time, fully cost-covered program will run online from April 15 to June 7, 2024, with 2 weeks in person in London. We encourage individuals from all countries [...]
Outline:
(01:31) Who is this program for?
(02:35) Why do we think this is promising?
(04:17) Our top recommended target countries
(05:25) Should you apply?
(06:43) Application process
First published:
December 5th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ME4ihqRojjuhprejm/effective-giving-incubation-apply-to-ce-and-gwwc-s-new
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
To EAs, "development economics" evokes the image of RCTs on psychotherapy or deworming. That is, after all, the closest interaction between EA and development economists. However, this characterization has prompted some pushback, in the form of the argument that all global health interventions pale in comparison to the Holy Grail: increasing economic growth in poor countries. After all, growth increases basically every measure of wellbeing on a far larger scale than any charity intervention, so it's obviously more important than any micro-intervention. Even a tiny chance of boosting growth in a large developing country will have massive expected value, more than all the GiveWell charities you can fund.
The argument is compelling[1] and well-received - so why haven't "growth interventions" gone anywhere? I think the EA understanding of growth is just too abstract to yield really useful interventions that EA organizations could lobby for or implement directly. We need specific [...]
Outline:
(02:31) Sectoral Transformation
(03:21) 1. Agricultural productivity growth can drive sectoral transformation... or hurt it.
(08:44) 2. Education leads people to move out of agriculture (but with some negative spillovers).
(10:39) 3. Barriers to reallocation are surprisingly small; people select into sectors based on their skills.
(12:36) 4. Most sectoral transformation today comes from people moving into services, not manufacturing.
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 2nd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H7rjCEmhcWscZsEnE/what-do-we-really-know-about-growth-in-lmics-part-1-sectoral
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
tl;dr: It actually seems pretty rare for people to care about the general good as such (i.e., optimizing cause-agnostic impartial well-being), as we can see by prejudged dismissals of EA concern for non-standard beneficiaries and for doing good via indirect means.
Introduction.
Moral truisms may still be widely ignored. The moral truism underlying Effective Altruism is that we have strong reasons to do more good, and it's worth adopting the efficient promotion of the impartial good among one's life projects. (One can do this in a “non-totalizing” way, i.e. without it being one's only project.) Anyone who personally adopts that project (to any non-trivial extent) counts, in my book, as an effective altruist (whatever their opinion of the EA movement and its institutions).
Many people don’t adopt this explicit goal as a personal priority to any degree, but still do significant good via more particular commitments (to more specific communities, causes, or individuals). [...]
Outline:
(03:14) Let's be honest
(08:36) OK, but what about the actual movement/institutions?
(09:32) Serious Evaluation Goes Beyond Vibes
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 1st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YKidYukDhKLBtDqsh/doing-good-effectively-is-unusual
Linkpost URL:
https://rychappell.substack.com/p/doing-good-effectively-is-unusual
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
effektiv-spenden.org is an effective giving platform in Germany and Switzerland that was founded in 2019. To reflect on our past impact, we examine Effektiv Spenden's cost-effectiveness as a "giving multiplier" from 2019 to 2022 in terms of how much money is directed to highly effective charities due to our work. We have two primary reasons for this analysis:
- To provide past and future donors with transparent information about our cost-effectiveness;
- To hold ourselves accountable, particularly in a situation where we are investing in further growth of our platform.
We provide both a simple multiple (or “leverage ratio”) of donations raised for highly effective charities compared to our operating costs, as well as an analysis of the counterfactual (i.e. what would have happened had we never existed).
Our analysis complements our Annual Review 2022 (in German) and builds on previous updates and annual reviews, such as, amongst others, our reviews of 2021 and 2019. [...]
Outline:
(02:07) Key results
(03:56) How to interpret our results
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
December 1st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wtjFne8WdcLJTpyWm/effektiv-spenden-s-impact-evaluation-2019-2023-exec-summary
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism — Scott Alexanderhttps://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ML6hxqM6g6mXewJtZ/in-continued-defense-of-effective-altruism-scott-alexander
**Linkpost URL:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.**
I took the GWWC Pledge in 2018, while I was an undergraduate student. I only have a hazy recollection of the journey that led to me taking the Pledge. I thought I’d write that down, reflect on how I feel now, and maybe share it.
In high-school, I was kind of cringe
I saw respected people wear suits, and I watched (and really liked) shows like Suits.
I unreflectively assumed I’d end up the same. The only time I would reflect on it was to motivate myself to study for my upcoming exams — I have memories of going to the bathroom as a 17-year old, looking at myself in the mirror, and imagining being successful. I imagined the BMW I might drive, the family I could provide for, and the nice house I could own. A lot of this was psychologically tied up in aspirations to be in great shape.
I was [...]
Outline:
(00:20) In high-school, I was kind of cringe
(02:09) In early university, I didn’t really know who I wanted to be
(04:20) Then, I started giving
(05:13) Then, I took the Pledge
(07:09) Does how we feel about giving matter?
First published:
November 29th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sdNYqwaTJ5j4hGZit/how-i-feel-about-my-gwwc-pledge
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The last year has been tough
The last year has been tough for EA.
FTX blew up in the most spectacular way and SBF has been found guilty of one of the biggest frauds in history. I was heartbroken to learn that someone I trusted hurt so many people, was heartbroken for the people who lost their money, and was heartbroken about the projects I thought would happen that no longer will. The media piled on, and on, and on.
The community has processed the shock in all sorts of ways — some more productive than others. Many have published thoughtful reflections. Many have tried to come up with ways to ensure that nothing like this will ever happen again. Some people rallied, some people looked for who to blame, we all felt betrayed.
I personally spent November–February working more than full-time on a secondment to Effective Ventures. Meanwhile, there were several [...]
Outline:
(00:03) The last year has been tough
(02:55) The EA community is good
(05:43) EA ideas are good
First published:
November 28th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dgXg6ddauC3sBwe67/ea-is-good-actually
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Rob Mather, CEO, AMF, 25 November 2023
2023 has been a very busy year for AMF, more on 2024 later.
Impact
AMF's team of 13 is in the middle of a nine-month period during which we are distributing, with partners, 90 million nets to protect 160 million people in six countries: Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan, Togo, Uganda, and Zambia.
The impact of these nets is expected to be, ± 20%, 40,000 deaths prevented, 20 million cases of malaria averted and a US$2.2 billion improvement in local economy (12x the funds applied). When people are ill they cannot farm, drive, teach – function, so the improvement in health leads to economic as well as humanitarian benefits.
This is a terrific contribution from the tens of thousands of donors who have contributed US$180 million over the last two years, and the many partners with whom we work that make possible the distribution [...]
First published:
November 24th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fkft56o8Md2HmjSP7/amf-reflecting-on-2023-and-looking-ahead-to-2024
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
With immense sadness, we want to let the community know about the passing of Sebastian Lodemann, who lost his life on November 9th, 2023, in a completely unexpected and sudden accident. Those who have met him know how humble and kind he was, in addition to being a brilliant and energetic person full of light. Sebastian was deeply altruistic, curious, and took seriously both the challenges facing our world, and its potential. He loved connecting with humans from across the globe and supporting as many people as he could, so there will be a wide international community of people who will keenly feel his absence.
Sebastian has been involved with EA since 2016, working on a wide range of projects in AI governance and strategy, pandemic prevention, civilisational resilience and career advising, and taking the Giving What We Can pledge.
We extend our deepest sympathies to Sebastian's wife, his children, his [...]
First published:
November 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dqDhXc9qirhPHjfXH/the-passing-of-sebastian-lodemann
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Despite the complicated and imperfect origins of American Thanksgiving, what's worth preserving is the moment it offers for society to step back and count our blessings. And in this moment, I want to express my gratitude to the EA community.
It's been a hard year for EA, and many of us have felt increasing levels of disillusionment. Still, a huge thank you to each of you for being part of this messy, but beautiful family.
What I love about EA is that at our core, we are people who look around and see a world is world is messed up and kind of shitty. But also, when we see this mess, we deeply feel a moral responsibility to do something about it. And rather than falling into despair, we are optimistic enough to think we can actually do something about it.
This more than anything else is what I think makes this [...]
First published:
November 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YRGSmjYDaMvScCXh2/a-thanksgiving-gratitude-post-to-ea
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The Giving What We Can research team is excited to share the results of our first round of evaluations of charity evaluators and grantmakers! After announcing our plans for a new research direction last year, we have now completed five[1] evaluations that will inform our donation recommendations for this giving season. There are substantial limitations to these evaluations, but we nevertheless think that this is a significant improvement on the status quo, in which there were no independent evaluations of evaluators’ work. We plan to continue to evaluate evaluators, extending the list beyond the five we’ve covered so far, improving our methodology, and regularly renewing our existing evaluations.
In this post, we share the key takeaways from each of these evaluations, and link to the full reports. Our website will be updated to reflect the new fund and charity recommendations that came out of these evaluations (alongside many other updates) on [...]
Outline:
(02:23) Global health and wellbeing
(02:26) GiveWell (GW)
(03:43) Happier Lives Institute (HLI)
(04:00) Animal welfare
(04:04) EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund (AWF)
(05:07) Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE)
(08:13) Reducing global catastrophic risks
(08:17) EA Funds’ Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF)
(09:57) Longview's Longermism Fund (LLF)
The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
November 22nd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PTHskHoNpcRDZtJoh/gwwc-s-evaluations-of-evaluators
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In honor of “Marginal Funding Week” for 2023 Giving Season on the EA Forum, I’d like to tell you what Rethink Priorities (RP) would do with funding beyond what we currently expect to raise from our major funders, and to emphasize that RP currently has a significant funding gap even after taking these major funders into account.
A personal appeal
Hi. I know it's traditional in EA to stick to the facts and avoid emotional content, but I can’t help but interject and say that this fundraising appeal is a bit different. It is personal to me. It's not just a list of things that we could take or leave, it's a fight for RP to survive the way I want it to as an organization that is intellectually independent and serves the EA community.
To be blunt, our funding situation is not where we want it to be. 2023 has been a [...]
Outline:
(07:00) General
(07:03) $1K - $10K per research work to allow us to publish our backlog of research
(11:29) Worldview Investigations
(11:33) $200K to do cause prioritization research and build on the cross-cause model
(14:27) $500K to do more worldview cause exploration
(14:58) Surveys and Data Analysis
(15:02) $60K to run the next EA Survey
(16:01) $40K-100K to more rigorously understand branding for EA and existential risk
(17:56) $25K-$100K to more rigorously understand EA's growth trajectory
(18:53) $40K to more rigorously understand branding for AI risk outreach
(19:35) $50K to more rigorously understand why people drop out of EA
(20:03) Animal welfare
(21:17) $250K to create a review of interventions to reduce the consumption of animal products
(22:10) $38K to create a Farmed Animals Impact Tracker
(23:09) $60K to understand interventions that would address crustacean welfare
(23:39) $50K for development and implementation of an insect farming welfare ask
(24:32) $100K to develop a database of possible near-term interventions for wild animals
(25:15) $75K to do a theory of change status report for the animal advocacy movement
(26:13) $300K to develop a better system similar to QALYs/DALYs but for animals
(27:18) Global Health and Development
(27:22) $405K to pilot our Value of Research model
(29:21) AI Governance
(29:25) $15K to write up learnings from spending a year attempting longtermist incubation
(30:07) $114K to train an additional AI policy researcher
(31:05) Included with your donation: talent pipelines and field building
(33:45) Conclusion
(36:19) Acknowledgements
First published:
November 21st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cMcEBSNiy4meDrmuE/rethink-priorities-needs-your-support-here-s-what-we-d-do
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Just as~2 years ago, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has significant room for more funding. This could be a pretty important point that informs end of year giving for a number of donors who are looking to make donations within the animal sector.
Briefly, here's why the Animal Welfare Fund has some pretty significant room for more funding at this point:
- Right now, there's currently ~$1M in the Animal Welfare Fund.
- We also now have 50 grants, summing to ~$4.5M in grants under evaluation.
- Between mid-last year and mid-this year, the EA AWF received ~350 applications over the past year of which ~150 were desk rejects and ~200 were graded by fund managers. Of these ~200, ~60 received funding, and ~30 received the grant amount they applied for or more.
- Assuming that the general shape of the pipeline remains similar, that could imply we may now have more grants than we can fund. Potentially [...]
First published:
November 20th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qpqab3LwmA6yBFJCk/the-ea-animal-welfare-fund-once-again-has-significant-room
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Thanks to Michael St. Jules for his comments.
Key Takeaways
- The evidence that animal welfare dominates in neartermism is strong.
- Open Philanthropy (OP) should scale up its animal welfare allocation over several years to approach a majority of OP's neartermist grantmaking.
- If OP disagrees, they should practice reasoning transparency by clarifying their views:
- How much weight does OP's theory of welfare place on pleasure and pain, as opposed to nonhedonic goods?
- Precisely how much more does OP value one unit of a human's welfare than one unit of another animal's welfare, just because the former is a human? How does OP derive this tradeoff?
- How would OP's views have to change for OP to prioritize animal welfare in neartermism?
Summary.
- Rethink Priorities (RP)'s moral weight research endorses the claim that the best animal welfare interventions are orders of magnitude (1000x) more cost-effective than the best neartermist alternatives.
- Avoiding this conclusion seems very difficult:
- Rejecting hedonism (the view that only pleasure and pain have moral [...]
Outline:
(00:09) Key Takeaways
(02:46) The Evidence Endorses Prioritizing Animal Welfare in Neartermism
(06:32) Objections
(06:35) Animal Welfare Does Not Dominate in Neartermism
(07:07) RPs Project Assumptions are Incorrect
(09:21) Endorsing Overwhelming Non-Hedonism
(14:13) Endorsing Overwhelming Hierarchicalism
(16:09) Its Strongly Intuitive that Helping Humans Helping Chickens
(16:46) Skepticism of Formal Philosophy
(17:58) Even if Animal Welfare Dominates, it Still Shouldnt Receive a Majority of Neartermist Funding
(18:12) Worldview Diversification Opposes Majority Allocations to Controversial Cause Areas
(19:43) OP is Already a Massive Animal Welfare Funder
(20:16) Animal Welfare has Faster Diminishing Marginal Returns than Global Health
(21:36) Increasing Animal Welfare Funding would Reduce OP's Influence on Philanthropists
(23:42) Request for Reasoning Transparency from OP
(26:13) Conclusion
First published:
November 19th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/btTeBHKGkmRyD5sFK/open-phil-should-allocate-most-neartermist-funding-to-animal
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc, the 501(c)(3) that acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, today announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company's chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.
A member of OpenAI's leadership team for five years, Mira has played a critical role in OpenAI's evolution into a global AI leader. She brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company's values, operations, and business, and already leads the company's research, product, and safety functions. Given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company, including her experience in AI governance and policy, the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.
Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the [...]
First published:
November 17th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjgD3Q5uWD2iJZpEN/sam-altman-fired-from-openai
Linkpost URL:
https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary
We (Habiba Banu and Roxanne Heston) have launched Spiro, a new TB screening and prevention charity focused on children. Our website is here.
We are fundraising $198,000 for our first year. We’re currently reaching out to people in the EA network. So far we have between 20%-50% of our budget promised and fundraising is currently one of the main things we’re focusing on.
The major components of our first year budget are co-founder time, country visits, and delivery of a pilot program, which aims to do household-level TB screening and provision of preventative medication.
We think that this project has a lot of promise:
- Tuberculosis has a huge global burden, killing 1.3 million people every year, and is disproportionately neglected and fatal in young children.
- The evidence for preventative treatment is robust and household programs are promising, yet few high-burden countries have scaled up this intervention.
- Modeling by Charity Entrepreneurship and by academics indicate that this [...]
Outline:
(02:10) Who are we?
(03:26) What are we going to do?
(04:12) Why TB?
(04:40) Why this intervention?
(06:36) Why Spiro?
(07:28) Budget
(09:21) Learn more
(09:36) Donations
First published:
November 17th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C8ZzjFc7aKT7ihmeK/spiro-new-tb-charity-raising-seed-funds
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
(Cross-posted from my website)
I’ve written a report about whether advanced AIs will fake alignment during training in order to get power later – a behavior I call “scheming” (also sometimes called “deceptive alignment”). The report is available on arXiv here. There's also an audio version here, and I’ve included the introductory section below. This section includes a full summary of the report, which covers most of the main points and technical terminology. I’m hoping that the summary will provide much of the context necessary to understand individual sections of the report on their own.
Abstract
This report examines whether advanced AIs that perform well in training will be doing so in order to gain power later – a behavior I call “scheming” (also sometimes called “deceptive alignment”). I conclude that scheming is a disturbingly plausible outcome of using baseline machine learning methods to train goal-directed AIs sophisticated enough to [...]
Outline:
(02:20) 0. Introduction
(11:44) 0.1 Preliminaries
(15:20) 0.2 Summary of the report
(15:49) 0.2.1 Summary of section 1
(17:55) 0.2.2 Summary of section 2
(34:10) 0.2.3 Summary of section 3
(38:10) 0.2.4 Summary of section 4
(50:17) 0.2.5 Summary of section 5
(53:50) 0.2.6 Summary of section 6
The original text contained 66 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
November 15th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jd7QinmkdzegerRCm/new-report-scheming-ais-will-ais-fake-alignment-during
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post summarizes how my partner and I decided whether to have children or not. We spent hundreds of hours on this decision and hope to save others part of that time. We found it very useful to read the thoughts of people who share significant parts of our values on the topic and thus want to "pay it forward" by writing this up. In the end, we decided to have children; our son is four months old now and we’re very happy with how we made the decision and with how our lives are now (through a combination of sheer luck and good planning). It was a very narrow and very tough decision though.
Both of us care a lot about having a positive impact on the world and our jobs are the main way we expect to have an impact (through direct work and/or earning to give). As a [...]
Outline:
(01:35) Process - how we decided
(04:25) Content - considerations we used
(04:29) Impact considerations
(04:33) Time
(07:29) Sleep
(10:45) Money
(11:33) Flexibility
(12:07) Effects on one's community
(13:07) Falling out of the heavy tail
(13:38) The childrens impact
(14:17) Value drift
(14:44) Personal life worthiness or happiness considerations
(14:49) Health
(18:06) Social/soft factors
(20:49) Overarching considerations
First published:
November 12th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YYnjHt5YzuHSH7oRR/kids-or-no-kids
Linkpost URL:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3MzDMBk4DZrbYePJS/kids-or-no-kids
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
(Written in a personal capacity, and not representing either my current employer or former one)
In 2016, I founded Utility Farm, and later merged it with Wild-Animal Suffering Research (founded by Persis Eskander) to form Wild Animal Initiative. Wild Animal Initiative is, by my estimation, a highly successful research organization. The current Wild Animal Initiative staff deserve all the credit for where they have taken the organization, but I’m incredibly proud that I got to be involved early in the establishment of a new field of study, wild animal welfare science, and to see the tiny organization I started in an apartment with a few hundred dollars go on to be recommended by ACE as a Top Charity for 4 years in a row. In my opinion, Wild Animal Initiative has become, under the stewardship of more capable people than I, the single best bet for unlocking interventions that could tackle [...]
Outline:
(08:21) A robust earning to give ecosystem is better for charities
(11:22) A robust earning to give ecosystem is better for the EA community
(13:59) The success of EA shouldn’t only be measured by how much money is moved by the community
First published:
November 11th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AyLF2KQ8AqQuiuDLz/a-robust-earning-to-give-ecosystem-is-better-for-ea
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I spoke with some people who worked or served on the board at organizations that had a leadership transition after things went seriously wrong. In some cases the organizations were EA-affiliated, in other cases only tangentially related to the EA space.
This is an informal collection of advice the ~eight people I spoke with have for staff or board members who might find themselves in a similar position. I bucketed this advice into a few categories below. Some are direct quotes and others are paraphrases of what they said. All spelling is Americanized for anonymity.
I’m sharing it here not because I think it's an exhaustive accounting of all types of potential leadership issues (it's not) or because I think any of this is unique to or particularly prevalent in or around EA (I don’t). But I hope that it's helpful to any readers who may someday be in a position like [...]
Outline:
(01:06) Written policies
(02:39) Role of board / advice for board
(06:12) Advice for staff
(10:39) More notes
First published:
November 9th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jLaDP2aWxdDCzwBYy/takes-from-staff-at-orgs-with-leadership-that-went-off-the
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Athena is a new research mentorship program fostering diversity of ideas in AI safety research. We aim to get more women and marginalized genders into technical research and offer the support needed to thrive in this space.
Applications for scholars are open until December 3rd, 2023
Apply as a scholar: here
Apply as a mentor or speaker: here
Financial aid is available for travel expenses for the in-person retreat to those otherwise unable to attend without it
Program Structure
A 2-month hybrid mentorship program for women looking to strengthen their research skills and network in technical AI safety research beginning in January 2024.
This includes 1-week in-person retreat in Oxford, UK followed by a 2-month remote mentorship by established researchers in the field, with networking and weekly research talks.
Athena aims to equip women with the knowledge, skills, and network they need to thrive in AI safety research. We believe that diversity is a strength [...]
Outline:
(01:32) Who should apply?
(01:53) Application process
(02:08) Questions?
(02:15) Why are we doing this
First published:
November 7th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B2t559dP65ffKZsDa/announcing-athena-women-in-ai-alignment-research
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
General note: The bulk of this post was written a couple of months ago, but I am releasing it now to coincide with the Effective Giving Spotlight week. I shortly expect to release a second post documenting some observations on the community building funding landscape.
Introduction
Way back in 2010, I was sitting in my parents' house, watching one of my favourite TV shows, the UK's Daily Politics. That day's guest was an Oxford academic by the name of Toby Ord. He was donating everything above £18000 (£26300 in today's money) to charity, and gently pushing others to give 10%.
"Nice guy," I thought. "Pity it'll never catch on."
Two years later, a couple of peers interned at Giving What We Can. At the same time, I did my own internship in finance, and my estimate of my earning potential quadrupled[1]. One year after that, I graduated and took the Giving What We [...]
Outline:
(01:13) Post goals
(02:28) My path
(03:07) Work
(05:36) Lifestyle Inflation
(07:48) Savings
(09:27) Donations
(10:11) Community
(10:14) Why engage?
(11:58) Why stop?
(13:48) Closing Thoughts
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
November 7th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gxppfWhx7ta2fkF3R/10-years-of-earning-to-give
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This write-up is a compilation of organisations and projects aligned / adjacent to the effective altruism movement in East Asia and Southeast Asia and was written around the EAGxPhilippines conference. Some organisations, projects, and contributors also prefer to not be public and hence removed from this write-up. While this is not an exhaustive list of projects and organisations per country in the region, it is a good baseline of the progress of the effective altruism movement for this side of the globe.
Feel free to click the links to the organisations/projects themselves to dive deeper into their works.
Contributors: Saad Siddiqui; Anthony Lau; Anthony Obeyesekere; Masayuki "Moon" Nagai; Yi-Yang Chua; Elmerei Cuevas, Alethea Faye Cedaña, Jaynell Ehren Chang, Brian Tan, Nastassja "Tanya" Quijano; Dion Tan, Jia Yang Li; Saeyoung Kim; Nguyen Tran; Alvin Lau
Forum Post Graphic credits to Jaynell Ehren Chang
EAGxPhotos credits to CS Creatives
Mainland China 🇨🇳
China Global Priorities Group
- Aims [...]
Outline:
(01:15) Mainland China 🇨🇳
(01:18) China Global Priorities Group
(01:51) City Group: EAHK
(03:13) University Group: EAHKU
(03:39) Academia (AI):
(04:51) Academia (Psychology):
(05:04) Cause specific organisations/ projects
(05:27) EA Indonesia
(08:17) EA Japan
(09:36) Malaysia 🇲🇾
(09:42) EA Malaysia
(10:15) Philippines 🇵🇭
(10:22) A. Meta Organizations/ Projects:
(11:18) B. Some Cause Specific Organisations
(12:57) Singapore 🇸🇬
(13:03) EA Singapore
(13:19) EA NUS
(13:27) Welfare Matters
(13:35) CEARCH
(13:45) GFI APAC
(13:53) Global Food Partners
(13:59) Effective Giving SG
(14:08) AI Safety
(14:14) South Korea 🇰🇷
(14:17) EA South Korea
(14:40) Viet Nam 🇻🇳
(14:46) EA Viet Nam
(14:55) EA Fullbright (Fulbright University Vietnam)
(15:02) LessWrong Vietnam
(15:11) Shrimp Welfare Project
(15:15) Taiwan 🇹🇼
(15:21) EA Taiwan
First published:
November 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NrqGyXzvwB2Gqu6XW/state-of-the-east-and-southeast-asian-eacosystem
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TLDR: The best research we have shows that clean water may provide a 30% mortality reduction to children under 5. This might be the biggest mortality reduction of any single global health intervention, yet we don’t understand why it works.
Here, I share my journey exploring a life-saving intervention that we don’t fully understand, but really should. I may err a little on the side of artistic license - so if you find inaccuracies please forgive me, correct me or even feel free to just tear me to shreds in the comments ;).
Part 1: Givewell's Seemingly absurd numbers
I first became curious after a glance at what seemed like a dubious GiveWell funded project. A $450,000 dollar scoping grant for water chlorination in Rwanda? This didn’t make intuitive sense to me.
In Sub-saharan Africa diarrhoea causes 5-10% of child mortality. While significant, the diarrhea problem continues to improve with better access to [...]
Outline:
(02:26) Part 2: A Nobel Prize winner's innovative math
(04:27) Part 3. We already knew about this anomaly – 100 years ago
(08:10) Part 5: What next for clean water?
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
November 4th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hFPbe2ZwmB9athsXT/clean-water-the-incredible-30-mortality-reducer-we-can-t
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post is a part of Rethink Priorities’ Worldview Investigations Team's CURVE Sequence: “Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation.” The aim of this sequence is twofold: first, to consider alternatives to expected value maximization for cause prioritization; second, to evaluate the claim that a commitment to expected value maximization robustly supports the conclusion that we ought to prioritize existential risk mitigation over all else. This post presents a software tool we're developing to better understand risk and effectiveness.
Executive Summary
The cross-cause cost-effectiveness model (CCM) is a software tool under development by Rethink Priorities to produce cost-effectiveness evaluations in different cause areas.
- The CCM enables evaluations of interventions in global health and development, animal welfare, and existential risk mitigation.
- The CCM also includes functionality for evaluating research projects aimed at improving existing interventions or discovering more effective alternatives.
The CCM follows a Monte Carlo approach to assessing probabilities.
- The CCM accepts user-supplied distributions as parameter [...]
Outline:
(00:43) Executive Summary
(04:24) Purpose
(05:36) Key Features
(05:52) We model uncertainty with simulations
(06:38) We incorporate user-specified parameter distributions
(07:17) Our results capture outcome ineffectiveness
(08:42) We enable users to specify the probability of extinction for different future eras
(09:28) Structure
(10:08) Intervention module
(10:40) Global Health and Development
(11:14) Animal Welfare
(12:00) Existential Risk Mitigation
(13:59) Research projects module
(14:56) Limitations
(15:12) It is geared towards specific kinds of interventions
(16:24) Distributions are a questionable way of handling deep uncertainty
(17:13) The model doesn’t handle model uncertainty
(18:01) The model assumes parameter independence
(18:59) Lessons
(19:06) The expected value of existential risk mitigation interventions depends on future population dynamics
(20:15) The value of existential risk mitigation is extremely variable
(21:38) Tail-end results can capture a huge amount of expected value
(22:22) Unrepresented correlations may be decisive
(23:43) Future Plans
(24:49) Acknowledgements
First published:
November 3rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pniDWyjc9vY5sjGre/rethink-priorities-cross-cause-cost-effectiveness-model
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A key question for many interventions' impact is how long the intervention changes some output counterfactually, or how long the intervention washes out. This is often the case for work to change policy: the cost-effectiveness of efforts to pass animal welfare ballot initiatives, nuclear non-proliferation policy, climate policy, and voting reform, for example, will depend on (a) whether those policies get repealed and (b) whether they would pass anyway. Often there is an explicit assumption, e.g., that passing a policy is equivalent to speeding up when it would have gone into place anyway by X years.[1] [2] As people routinely note when making these assumptions, it is very unclear what assumption would be appropriate.
In a new paper (my economics "job market paper"), I address this question, focusing on U.S. referendums but with some data on other policymaking processes:
Policy choices sometimes appear stubbornly persistent, even when they become politically unpopular or [...]
Outline:
(02:20) Overview of Results and Methods
(06:23) Notes Particular to the EA Community
(06:27) Policy Changes Seem to Matter (Much) Longer than EAs Have Assumed
(07:34) Neglectedness Matters
(08:02) Comparing Persistence: Can We Compare Policy to Other Social Changes?
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
November 2nd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jCwuozHHjeoLPLemB/how-long-do-policy-changes-matter-new-paper
Linkpost URL:
https://zachfreitasgroff.com/FreitasGroff_Policy_Persistence.pdf
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
YouGov recently reported the results of a survey (n=1000) suggesting that about “one in five (22%) Americans are familiar with effective altruism.”[1]
We think these results are exceptionally unlikely to be true. Their 22% figure is very similar to the proportion of Americans we previously found claim to have heard of effective altruism (19%) in our earlier survey (n=6130). But, after conducting appropriate checks, we estimated that much lower percentages are likely to have genuinely heard of EA[2] (2.6% after the most stringent checks, which we speculate is still likely to be somewhat inflated[3]).
Is it possible that these numbers have simply dramatically increased following the FTX scandal?
Fortunately, we have tested this with multiple followup surveys explicitly designed with this possibility in mind.[4]
In our most recent survey (conducted October 6th[5]), we estimated that approximately 16% (13.0%-20.4%) of US adults would claim to have heard of EA. Yet, when we add in [...]
Outline:
(02:00) Attitudes towards EA
(02:35) Conclusions
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
November 2nd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CwKiAt54aJjcqoQDh/are-1-in-5-americans-familiar-with-ea
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Intro
A few months ago, the other (former) Alvea executives and I made the difficult decision to wind Alvea down and return our remaining funding to investors. In this post, I’ll share an overview of Alvea's story and highlight a few of our wins and challenges from my perspective as an Alvea Co-Founder and former CTO, in hopes that our experiences might be useful to others who are working on (or considering) ambitious projects to solve the biggest problems in the world. I’m sharing everything below in a personal capacity and as a window into my current thinking—this is not the definitive or official word on Alvea and it doesn’t necessarily represent the views of any other Alvea team members. I expect my reflections to continue evolving as I further process the journey and outcomes of this project, and hope to share more along the way.
Alvea's Story
First vaccine sprint and [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Intro
(00:55) Alvea's Story
(00:59) First vaccine sprint and decision to continue Alvea (December 2021 through April 2022)
(02:48) Product pursuits (May 2022 through July 2022)
(04:04) Second vaccine sprint (August 2022-December 2023)
(05:22) Funding environment change and pivot (Dec 2022 - May 2023)
(07:33) Wind down and PanLabs spin out (June-Present)
(09:08) Wins
(09:11) Record time to safe clinical development
(10:12) General-purpose rapid drug development capacity
(11:12) Team Development
(12:09) Medical countermeasure knowledge
(13:02) Challenges
(13:22) Challenges of rapid growth
(14:21) Costs of complex non-standard corporate set up
(15:00) Navigating the transition from short- to long-term goals
(16:12) Conclusion
First published:
November 1st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/d9bamQHBAwAjuKtNA/alvea-s-story-wins-and-challenges-unofficial
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
After careful consideration, we made the difficult decision to wind Alvea down and return our remaining funds to investors. This decision was the result of many months of experimentation and analysis regarding Alvea's strategy, path to impact, and commercial potential, which ultimately led us to the conclusion that Alvea's overall prospects were not sufficiently compelling to justify the requisite investment of money, time, and energy over the coming years.
Alvea started in late 2021 as a moonshot to rapidly develop and deploy a room temperature-stable DNA vaccine candidate against the Omicron wave of COVID-19, and we soon became the fastest startup to take a new drug from founding to a Phase 1 clinical trial. However, we decided to discontinue our lead candidate during the follow-up period of the trial as the case for large-scale impact weakened amidst the evolving pandemic landscape. Over the following year, we explored different applications of our [...]
First published:
November 1st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3EjExF8HeJbmk4Bp4/alvea-wind-down-announcement-official
Linkpost URL:
https://www.alvea.bio/winddown/
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Released today (10/30/23) this is crazy, perhaps the most sweeping action taken by government on AI yet.
Below, I've segmented by x-risk and near term risk related proposals. It's worth noting that some of these are very specific and direct an action to be taken by one of the executive branch organizations (i.e. sharing of saftey test results) but others are guidances, which involve "calls on Congress" to pass legislation that codifies the desired action.
Existential Risk Related Actions:
- Require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government. In accordance with the Defense Production Act, the Order will require that companies developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety must notify the federal government when training the model, and must share the results of all [...]
Outline:
(00:37) Existential Risk Related Actions:
(03:10) Near Term Risk Actions:
(03:14) General
(03:46) Privacy
(04:33) Discrimination
(05:11) Jobs
First published:
October 30th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pcbsM45vLmHcFpNnr/president-biden-issues-executive-order-on-safe-secure-and
Linkpost URL:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/10/30/fact-sheet-president-biden-issues-executive-order-on-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-artificial-intelligence/
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Views are my own, not Open Philanthropy's. I am married to the President of Anthropic and have a financial interest in both Anthropic and OpenAI via my spouse.
Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to help out with efforts to get responsible scaling policies adopted. In that context, a number of people have said it would be helpful for me to be publicly explicit about whether I’m in favor of an AI pause. This post will give some thoughts on these topics.
I think transformative AI could be soon, and we’re not ready
I have a strong default to thinking that scientific and technological progress is good and that worries will tend to be overblown. However, I think AI is a big exception here because of its potential for unprecedentedly rapid and radical transformation.1
I think [...]
Outline:
(00:36) I think transformative AI could be soon, and we’re not ready
(02:11) If it were all up to me, the world would pause now - but it isn’t, and I’m more uncertain about whether a “partial pause” is good
(07:46) Responsible scaling policies (RSPs) seem like a robustly good compromise with people who have different views from mine (with some risks that I think can be managed)
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 27th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ntWikwczfSi8AJMg3/we-re-not-ready-thoughts-on-pausing-and-responsible-scaling
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary
- Given EA's history and values, I’d have expected for impact evaluation to be a distinguishing feature of the movement. In fact, impact evaluation seems fairly rare in the EA space.
- There are some things specific actors could do for EA to get more of the benefits of impact evaluation. For example, organisations that don’t already could carry out evaluations of their impact, and a well-suited individual could start an organisation to carry out impact evaluations and analysis of the EA movement.
- Overall I’m unsure to what extent more focus on impact evaluation would be an improvement. On the one hand, establishing impact is challenging for many EA activities and impact evaluation can be burdensome. On the other hand, an organisation's historic impact seems very action-relevant to its future activities and current levels of impact evaluation seem low.
What Is Impact Evaluation?
Over the last year I’ve been speaking to EA orgs about their impact [...]
Outline:
(00:59) What Is Impact Evaluation?
(01:22) Why is Impact Evaluation Important?
(02:17) I’d expect Impact Evaluation to be quite common in EA
(03:00) Impact evaluation is fairly rare in EA
(04:42) Potentially justified reasons for this
(05:58) Some low- to medium-cost opportunities
(08:11) Conclusion
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 26th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hDNpHEA2Kn4xBoS8r/impact-evaluation-in-ea
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Figure 1 (see full caption below)This post is a part of Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigations Team's CURVE Sequence: "Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation." The aim of this sequence is twofold: first, to consider alternatives to expected value maximisation for cause prioritisation; second, to evaluate the claim that a commitment to expected value maximisation robustly supports the conclusion that we ought to prioritise existential risk mitigation over all else.
Executive Summary
Background
- This report builds on the model originally introduced by Toby Ord on how to estimate the value of existential risk mitigation.
- The previous framework has several limitations, including:
- The inability to model anything requiring shorter time units than centuries, like AI timelines.
- A very limited range of scenarios considered. In the previous model, risk and value growth can take different forms, and each combination represents one scenario
- No explicit treatment of persistence –– how long the mitigation efforts’ effects last for ––as a variable of interest.
- No easy way [...]
Outline:
(00:38) Executive Summary
(05:26) Abridged Report
(11:20) Generalised Model: Arbitrary Risk Profile
(13:37) Value
(19:00) Great Filters and the Time of Perils Hypothesis
(21:06) Decaying Risk
(21:55) Results
(21:58) Convergence
(25:35) The Expected Value of Mitigating Risk Visualised
(31:59) Concluding Remarks
(35:00) Acknowledgements
The original text contained 24 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S9H86osFKhfFBCday/how-bad-would-human-extinction-be
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I am excited about AI developers implementing responsible scaling policies; I’ve recently been spending time refining this idea and advocating for it. Most people I talk to are excited about RSPs, but there is also some uncertainty and pushback about how they relate to regulation. In this post I’ll explain my views on that:
- I think that sufficiently good responsible scaling policies could dramatically reduce risk, and that preliminary policies like Anthropic's RSP meaningfully reduce risk by creating urgency around key protective measures and increasing the probability of a pause if those measures can’t be implemented quickly enough.
- I think that developers implementing responsible scaling policies now increases the probability of effective regulation. If I instead thought it would make regulation harder, I would have significant reservations.
- Transparency about RSPs makes it easier for outside stakeholders to understand whether an AI developer's policies are adequate to manage risk, and creates a focal point for [...]
Outline:
(02:03) Why I’m excited about RSPs
(03:26) Thoughts on an AI pause
(04:56) I expect RSPs to help facilitate effective regulation
(06:24) Anthropic's RSP
(09:16) On the name “responsible scaling”
First published:
October 24th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cKW4db8u2uFEAHewg/thoughts-on-responsible-scaling-policies-and-regulation
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
NIMBYs don’t call themselves NIMBYs. They call themselves affordable housing advocates or community representatives or environmental campaigners. They’re usually not against building houses. They just want to make sure that those houses are affordable, attractive to existing residents, and don’t destroy habitat for birds and stuff.
Who can argue with that? If, ultimately, those demands stop houses from being built entirely, well, that's because developers couldn’t find a way to build them without hurting poor people, local communities, or birds and stuff.
This is called politics and it's powerful. The most effective anti-housebuilding organisation in the UK doesn’t call itself Pause Housebuilding. It calls itself the Campaign to Protect Rural England, because English people love rural England. CPRE campaigns in the 1940s helped shape England's planning system. As a result, permission to build houses is only granted when it's in the “public interest”; in practice it is given infrequently and often with [...]
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/avrFeH6LpqJrjmGmc/pausing-ai-might-be-good-policy-but-it-s-bad-politics
Linkpost URL:
https://unfoldingatlas.substack.com/p/pause-ai-is-bad-politics
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
After launching our first batch of 2023 charities in April, we are now thrilled to announce the launch of four new nonprofit organizations through our July/August 2023 Incubation Program.
The 2023 Round 2 incubated charities are:
- Clear Solutions - Providing treatment for young children to prevent deaths from diarrhoeal diseases.
- Lafiya Nigeria - Reducing maternal mortality by providing safe family planning options in rural northern Nigeria.
- Alliance for Reducing Microbial Resistance - Supporting sustainable access to and the development of antimicrobials to combat antimicrobial resistance.
- Concentric Policies - Preventing and controlling noncommunicable diseases through data-driven policymaking.
Detailed introductions to the new projects will follow below.
Context: The Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program July-August 2023
The July-August 2023 program focused on global health, including health security and policy-focused interventions. Our generous donors from the CE Seed Network have provided the new initiatives with $583,000 seed funding to kickstart their interventions.
In addition to the seed grants, as usual, we will [...]
Outline:
(02:13) Our new charities introduce themselves:
(02:17) CLEAR SOLUTIONS
(09:01) CONCENTRIC POLICIES
First published:
October 19th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pKDob5yXh2djqdgcP/presenting-2023-incubated-charities-round-2-charity
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary of Findings
It has been almost a year since FTX went bankrupt on November 11, 2022. Some of the ways that has impacted EA have been obvious, like the shuttering of the FTX Foundation, expected to be one of the biggest EA funders. But recent discussions show that the broader impact of the FTX scandal on EA isn’t well understood, and that there is a desire for more empirical evidence on this topic. To that end, I have aggregated a variety of publicly available EA metrics to improve the evidence base. Unfortunately, these wide-ranging perspectives clearly show a broad-based and worrisome deterioration of EA activity in the aftermath of FTX.
Previous attempts to quantify how FTX impacted EA have focused on surveys of members of the EA community, university students, the general public, and university group organizers. These surveys were conducted in the months following FTX's collapse. Their results have been [...]
Outline:
(00:04) Summary of Findings
(04:22) Detailed Findings
(04:25) Notes on Data Sources and Presentation
(05:21) Donation Data
(05:24) EA Funds: Donation and Donor Data
(08:10) GWWC Pledges
(08:43) EA Newsletter Subscriptions
(09:41) Attitude Data
(09:44) Survey of EA Community
(12:20) Surveys of University Populations and General Public
(13:47) Engagement Metrics
(13:51) EffectiveAltruism.org Web Traffic
(16:52) EA Forum
(19:09) Google Search Interest
(20:39) EA Global and EA Global X
(22:51) Virtual Programs
(23:47) 80k Metrics
(24:22) University Group Accelerator Program
(24:43) Additional data that would shed more light on FTX's impact and its causes
(27:42) Conclusions
(29:24) Appendix: Meta commentary about data collection and distribution
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 17th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vXzEnBcG7BipkRSrF/how-has-ftx-s-collapse-impacted-ea
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This post is a part of Rethink Priorities’ Worldview Investigations Team's CURVE Sequence: “Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation.” The aim of this sequence is twofold: first, to consider alternatives to expected value maximization for cause prioritization; second, to evaluate the claim that a commitment to expected value maximization robustly supports the conclusion that we ought to prioritize existential risk mitigation over all else.
Summary
- Expected value (EV) maximization is a common method for making decisions across different cause areas. The EV of an action is an average of the possible outcomes of that action, weighted by the probability of those outcomes occurring if the action is performed.
- When comparing actions that would benefit different species (e.g., malaria prevention for humans, cage-free campaigns for chickens, stunning operations in shrimp farms), calculating EV includes assessing the probability that the individuals it affects are sentient.
- Small invertebrates, like shrimp and insects, have relatively low probabilities [...]
Outline:
(04:12) 1. Introduction
(07:13) 2. Results of EV maximization
(10:33) 3. Dissatisfaction with results of EV maximization
(14:57) 4. Risk
(16:25) 5. Risk aversion as avoiding worst case outcomes
(16:30) 5.1. Risk aversion about outcomes
(18:22) 5.2. A formal model of risk aversion about outcomes
(21:45) 6. Risk aversion as avoiding inefficacy
(22:12) 6.1. Difference-making risk aversion
(23:45) 6.2. The risk of wasting money on non-sentient creatures
(27:10) 6.3. Is difference-making risk aversion rational?
(29:10) 6.4. A formal model of difference-making risk aversion
(32:51) 7. Risk as avoiding ambiguity
(40:19) 8. What about chickens?
(45:01) 9. Conclusions
(47:19) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 34 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 16th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HMakzketADQq4bkvD/the-risks-and-rewards-of-prioritizing-animals-of-uncertain
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I’m a grantmaker who previously spent a decade as a professional investor. I’ve recently helped some Open Phil, GiveWell, and Survival and Flourishing Fund grantees with their cash and foreign exchange (FX) management. In the EA community, we seem collectively quite bad at this. My aim with this post is to help others 80/20 their cash and FX management: for 20% of the effort (these 4 items below), we can capture 80% of the benefit of corporate best practices. This will often be a highly impactful use of your time: I think that for the median organization, implementing these suggestions will take 15 to 30 hours of staff time, but will be about as valuable as raising 5% more money.
My suggestions are:
- have more than one bank
- invest your cash in a government-guaranteed money market account, earning ~5%
- hold international currencies in the same proportions as your spending in those currencies
- watch out for [...]
Outline:
(01:09) Have more than one bank
(03:04) Invest your cash in a government guaranteed money market account, earning ~5%
(06:59) Hold FX in the same proportions as your spending
(08:58) Watch out for FX fees
First published:
October 14th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/akSr4YXHKZcK8EnQe/cash-and-fx-management-for-ea-organizations
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Philanthropist Chuck Feeney died on October 9, at 92. He founded one of the largest private charitable foundations in history, giving away his entire fortune within his lifetime. He was almost obsessively secretive in his giving, and set a standard of seriousness which inspired the Giving Pledge and many of its pledgers.
Feeney was born at the tail end of the Great Depression into modest circumstances, raised by blue-collar Irish-American parents, and became the first of his family to attend university.
The story of his fortune began after Feeney enrolled in the U.S. Air Force, soon deployed to Japan as a radio operator during the Korean War. The 1944 GI Bill of Rights had entitled returning GIs to a course of study after WWII, and the scheme was renewed for Korean War veterans. He used the allowance to attend Cornell, graduated in 1956, then travelled to Europe to indulge a newly developed [...]
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 11th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yS3qRbHzzWxjR2Ehp/chuck-feeney-1931-2023
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Crosspost from Astral Codex Ten.
I.
Last month, Ben West of the Center for Effective Altruism hosted a debate among long-termists, forecasters, and x-risk activists about pausing AI.
Everyone involved thought AI was dangerous and might even destroy the world, so you might expect a pause - maybe even a full stop - would be a no-brainer. It wasn’t. Participants couldn’t agree on basics of what they meant by “pause”, whether it was possible, or whether it would make things better or worse.
There was at least some agreement on what a successful pause would have to entail. Participating governments would ban “frontier AI models”, for example models using more training compute than GPT-4. Smaller models, or novel uses of new models would be fine, or else face an FDA-like regulatory agency. States would enforce the ban against domestic companies by monitoring high-performance microchips; they would enforce it against non-participating governments by banning [...]
The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 10th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7WfMYzLfcTyDtD6Gn/pause-for-thought-the-ai-pause-debate
Linkpost URL:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/pause-for-thought-the-ai-pause-debate
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Last year, we committed $350 million to GiveWell's evidence-backed, cost-effective recommendations in global health and development.
This year, we’re committing $300M to support GiveWell's recommendations over the next three years. This returns our annual support to its 2020 level ($100M/year). And it brings us to more than $1 billion in funding for GiveWell's recommendations over the course of Open Philanthropy's existence.
We’re committing all of this funding now, but we anticipate that GiveWell will spend it at their discretion in whatever way they think helps beneficiaries the most. As they explain in this post, they’ve been spending carefully in anticipation of a potential decrease in our funding; we’ve been discussing this with them actively as we developed our plan for the next few years.
The rest of this post:
- Shares examples of recent GiveWell recommendations we’ve funded.
- Discusses reasons we’ve increased our bar for funding in our Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio.
- Explains how GiveWell's impressive [...]
Outline:
(01:32) Where our funding to GiveWell's recommendations ultimately goes
(03:13) Our higher bar for Global Health and Wellbeing giving
(05:42) How GiveWell's impressive growth and our higher Global Health and Wellbeing bar influence our current plans
(13:28) This means that the marginal GiveWell opportunity will be at least as strong as in past years
(13:59) Closing thoughts
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KuByzfn6yiKMWBKmr/our-planned-allocation-to-givewell-s-recommendations-for-the
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In the latest episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast, Kevin Esvelt talks about the New World screwworm. He claims that there is a potential for a massive animal welfare win, if we can eliminate this parasite.
This feels worthy of a discussion, so I'm starting this thread. Is this issue on anyone's radar? Has anyone looked into these claims? They seem potentially important/actionable, if true!
Relevant section from the podcast:
Kevin Esvelt: [...] the New World screwworm, which has the amazing scientific name of Cochliomyia hominivorax: “the man devourer.” But it doesn’t primarily eat humans; it feeds indiscriminately on warm-blooded things, so mammals and birds. It's a botfly that lays its eggs in open wounds, anything as small as a tick bite. And it's called the screwworm because the larvae are screw-shaped and they drill their way into living flesh, devouring it. And as they do, they cultivate bacteria that attract [...]
First published:
October 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JWuPdMaPiNy7AD3AX/potentially-actionable-opportunity-eliminating-the-new-world
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Key Points
- Animal parties are minor (niche) political parties with a single-issue focus on animals.
- Animal parties can win seats in elections that use proportional representation. The most important strategic decision is to choose to contest elections where seats can be won with just a couple of percent of the vote. Animal parties have won seats in five countries (Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal).
- When an animal party wins even one seat or a couple of seats, the impact for animals is typically positive and moderate. Occasionally, the impact can be enormous.
- We recommend a handful of countries where we think small grants are likely to help animal parties win at least one seat. Providing initial funding for animal parties in these countries appears to be low-hanging fruit, and this small level of funding is likely to have a disproportionately high level of impact.
Executive Summary
This approach involves establishing political parties with an explicit [...]
Outline:
(00:09) Key Points
(01:07) Executive Summary
(08:06) Table of Contents
(10:18) 1. How Do Animal Advocacy Parties Work?
(12:45) 2. Theory of Change
(16:08) 3. Voting Systems and Minor Parties
(16:38) 3.1 We focus on proportional representation
(24:05) 3.2 Contesting more elections seems better than spending more on advertising
(29:10) 4. Current Seats: Where Have Animal Parties Won Seats?
(32:31) 5. Expanding Existing Parties: Where Could Animal Parties Win More Seats?
(32:38) 5.1 Where do animal parties exist?
(34:08) 5.2 Method: How we forecast the chance of winning a seat
(39:22) 5.3 Results: Our predicted chances of winning a seat for existing parties
(40:51) 6. Future Parties: Where Could Future Animal Parties Be Established?
(40:58) 6.1 Where do animal parties not yet exist?
(42:14) 6.2 Results: Our predicted chances of winning a seat for future parties
(43:20) 7. European Parliament: Could Animal Parties Win More Seats in the European Parliament?
(45:29) 8. Track Record of Existing Parties
(45:53) 8.1 Australia: Animal Justice Party (New South Wales)
(51:15) 8.2 Belgium: Victoria Austraet, Independent
(54:39) 8.3 France: Ecological Revolution for the Living (REV)
(56:30) 8.4 Netherlands: Party for the Animals
(59:45) 8.5 Portugal: People-Animals-Nature (PAN)
(01:02:11) 9. Cost-Effectiveness Analysis
(01:02:16) 9.1 Costs: Parties often pay for themselves
(01:07:51) 9.2 Impact: Our rough back-of-the-envelope calculation
(01:17:09) 10. Academic Literature
(01:17:13) 10.1 What do studies tell us about animal parties?
(01:22:22) 10.2 How do minor parties influence policy?
(01:31:34) 10.3 What is the relationship between elections, veg*n voters, and animal welfare?
(01:35:34) 11. An Alternative Strategy: Voting Blocs
(01:43:55) Acknowledgements
(01:44:09) Bibliography
First published:
October 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kiq83nGBoK8tih4wB/party-politics-for-animal-advocacy-part-1-animal-focused
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Epistemic status: Hot takes for discussion. These observations are a side product of another strategy project, rather than a systematic and rigorous analysis of the funding landscape, and we may be missing important considerations. Observations are also non-exhaustive and mostly come from anecdotal data and EA Forum posts. We haven’t vetted the resources that we are citing; instead, we took numerous data points at face value and asked for feedback from >5 people who have more of an inside view than we do (see acknowledgments, but note that these people do not necessarily endorse all claims). We aim to indicate our certainty in the specific claims we are making.
Context and summary
While researching for another project, we discovered that there have been some significant changes in the EA funding landscape this year. We found these changes interesting and surprising enough that we wanted to share them, to potentially help people update [...]
Outline:
(00:47) Context and summary
(05:52) Some observations on the general EA funding landscape
(05:57) More funding sources
(08:00) More activity in the effective giving ecosystem
(08:41) Changes in funding flows
(14:01) Potential future EA funding
(15:09) Some observations on the AI safety funding landscape
(15:29) A brief overview of the broad AI safety funding landscape
(18:39) There might be more funding gaps in AI safety this year
(22:19) Potential future AI safety funding
(25:07) Further questions
(27:17) Further resources (non-exhaustive)
(27:58) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 18 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 2nd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RueHqBuBKQBtSYkzp/observations-on-the-funding-landscape-of-ea-and-ai-safety
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a summary of a report on trends in violence since the dawn of humanity: from the hunter-gatherer period to the present day.[1] The full report is available at this Substack and as a preprint on SSRN.[2] Phil did 95% of the work on the report.
Expert reviewers provided the following comments on our report.
“Thomson and Halstead have provided an admirably thorough and fair assessment of this difficult and emotionally fraught empirical question. I don’t agree with all of their conclusions, but this will surely be the standard reference for this issue for years to come.”
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University
“This work uses an impressively comprehensive survey of ethnographic and archeological data on military mortality in historically and archeologically known small-scale societies in an effort to pin down the scale of the killing in the pre-agricultural world. This will be a useful [...]
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
October 2nd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QH2sECmmbLWbMXLhJ/violence-before-agriculture
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
From the looks of it, next week might be rough for people who care about Effective Altruism. As CEA acting CEO Ben West pointed out on the forum:
“Sam Bankman-Fried's trial is scheduled to start October 3, 2023, and Michael Lewis's book about FTX comes out the same day. My hope and expectation is that neither will be focused on EA …
Nonetheless, I think there's a decent chance that viewing the Forum, Twitter, or news media could become stressful for some people, and you may want to pre-emptively create a plan for engaging with that in a healthy way.
I really appreciated that comment since I didn’t know that and I’m glad I had time to mentally prepare. As someone who does outward facing voluntary community building at my workplace and in London, I feel nervous. I’ve written this piece to manage that anxiety. I actually wrote a lot of it [...]
Outline:
(01:04) Thoughts on EA after 2022
(06:30) Why I’m still publicly going out to bat for EA
(10:46) Conclusion and some caveats
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 30th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wGKGrCYNwjhhK4N69/why-i-m-still-going-out-to-bat-for-the-ea-movement-post-ftx
Linkpost URL:
https://bashingthearc.substack.com/p/why-im-still-going-out-to-bat-for
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It's been another busy year at Open Philanthropy; after nearly doubling the size of our team in 2022, we’ve added over 30 new team members so far in 2023. Now we’re launching a number of open applications for roles in all of our Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) cause area teams (AI Governance and Policy, Technical AI Safety, Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness, GCR Cause Prioritization, and GCR Capacity Building[1]).
The application, job descriptions, and general team information are available here.
We’re hiring because our GCR teams feel pinched and really need more capacity. Program Officers in GCR areas think that growing their teams will lead them to make significantly more grants at or above our current bar. We’ve had to turn down potentially promising opportunities because we didn’t have enough time to investigate them[2]; on the flip side, we’re likely currently allocating tens of millions of dollars suboptimally in ways that more [...]
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 29th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bBefhAXpCFNswNr9m/open-philanthropy-is-hiring-for-multiple-roles-across-our
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
As some of you know, I’m working on growing the US market for Chinese tofus. I believe it could be a way to significantly reduce animal suffering, while shifting American dining culture.
We just launched our book - Broken Cuisine - which introduces five of these tofus to Western home cooks. The goal is to spark curiosity and demand for these ingredients, so that we can convince retailers to carry them.
Do you have five minutes right now to take an action?
- Download our FREE e-book on Amazon. (If possible, TODAY)
- Skim through.
- A day or two later, leave an honest review. (Amazon easily detects spam.)
Downloading and reviewing our book during launch week will convince the Amazon recommender algorithm to push our book, creating a virtuous cycle that will bring it to more people. If Broken Cuisine can crack the bestseller lists, I'm hopefully we can meaningfully start growing the market for these foods!
Thank [...]
First published:
September 27th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RTG4ZAy6bqJqXo7uW/our-tofu-book-has-launched-upvote-on-amazon
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I’m extremely excited to announce the launch of our new community strategy that aims to connect our existing community better, and inspire more people to join us – I’ve been working on this for the past few months and am thrilled to finally share it!
Over the almost two years I’ve been working with Giving What We Can, I’ve seen how important our community is — whether it's a supportive network to ask questions, a friendly face in a new city, or a shared sense that none of us are alone in wanting to do what we can to make a better world, I’ve personally taken much-needed inspiration, motivation, and comfort more times than I can count, simply by hearing from you!
I want to make it easier for you to do the same.
We are launching some new spaces for you to meet, connect, and chat with each other. [...]
Outline:
(01:51) TL;DR: How do I get involved?
(02:15) 1: GWWC Local Groups
(04:14) What will GWWC Groups look like?
(05:39) Locations for GWWC Groups
(06:57) What if we already have a local group focused on creating community around effective giving?
(07:28) Help run a GWWC Group
(09:20) Can I run events about effective giving if I’m not part of a group?
(10:19) One for the World is helping to support our groups
(10:54) Evaluating the trial
(11:29) FAQ:
(11:33) Being a part of a local group
(13:19) 2: Our new online community space
(14:17) 3: Global Effective Giving Community Directory
First published:
September 26th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KuNsnszBxENS3tWMm/gwwc-s-new-community-strategy
Linkpost URL:
https://givingwhatwecan.org/blog/community-strategy-2023
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Overview
The total moral value of the world includes humans as well as all other beings of moral significance. As such, a picture of the overall trajectory of net global welfare that accounts for both human and non-human populations is important context for thinking about the future on any timescale, and about the potential impacts of transformative technologies.
There's compelling evidence that life has gotten better for humans recently, but the same can’t be said for other animals, especially given the rise of industrial animal agriculture. How do these trends cash out, and what's the overall trajectory?
I’ve used human and farmed animal population data, estimates of welfare ranges across different species, and estimates of the average wellbeing of different species to get a rough sense of recent trends in total global welfare. Importantly, this initial analysis is limited to humans and some of the most abundant farmed animals—it does not consider effects [...]
Outline:
(00:04) Overview
(01:49) Notes and Assumptions
(03:36) Analysis
(03:39) Background and Definitions
(04:57) Populations
(05:57) Welfare Capacities
(07:10) Total Welfare
(09:29) Tentative Reflections
(11:33) Future Directions
(12:38) Acknowledgments
First published:
September 26th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HDFxQwMwPp275J87r/net-global-welfare-may-be-negative-and-declining-1
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Andy Weber was the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical & Biological Defense Programs from 2009 to 2014. He's now a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks. You might also know him from his appearance on the 80,000 Hours Podcast. Ask him anything![1]
He’ll try to answer some questions on Friday, September 29 (afternoon, Eastern Time), and might get to some earlier.
I (Lizka) am particularly excited that Andy can share his experience in nuclear (and other kinds of) threat reduction given that it is Petrov Day today.
Instructions and practical notes:
- Please post your questions as comments on this post.
- Posting questions earlier is better than later.
- If you have multiple questions, it might be better to post them separately.
- Feel free to upvote questions that others have posted, as it might help prioritize questions later.
Other context and topics that might be especially interesting to talk about:
- Risks of “tactical” nuclear [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 26th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KbTasufbtJwZYiJQ8/ama-andy-weber-u-s-assistant-secretary-of-defense-from-2009
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Our team at Our World in Data just launched a new page on animal welfare! There you can find a brand new Animal Welfare Data Explorer, 22 interactive charts, and 4 new articles:
- How many animals get slaughtered every day?
- How many animals are factory-farmed?
- Do better cages or cage-free environments really improve the lives of hens?
- Adopting slower-growing breeds of chicken would reduce animal suffering significantly
On Our World in Data, we cover many topics related to reducing human suffering: alleviating poverty, reducing child and maternal mortality, curing diseases, and ending hunger.
But if we aim to reduce total suffering, society's ability to reduce this in other animals – which feel pain, too – also matters.
This is especially true when we look at the numbers: every year, humans slaughter more than 80 billion land-based animals for farming alone. Most of these animals are raised in factory farms, often in painful and inhumane conditions.
Estimates for fish [...]
First published:
September 25th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pydpzj9sxcdSsAngr/new-page-on-animal-welfare-on-our-world-in-data
Linkpost URL:
https://ourworldindata.org/animal-welfare
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary
Shrimp Welfare Project launched in Sep 2021, via the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. We aim to reduce the suffering of billions of farmed shrimps. This post summarises our work to date, what we plan to work on going forward, and clarifies areas where we’re not focusing our attention. This post was written to coincide with the launch of our new (Shr)Impact page on our website.
We have four broad workstreams: corporate engagement, farmer support, research, and raising issue salience. We believe our key achievements to date are:
- Corporate engagement: Our Humane Slaughter Initiative (commitments with large producers to purchase electrical stunners, such as MER Seafood, and Seajoy), ongoing conversations with UK retailers (including Marks & Spencer, who now have a published Decapod Welfare Policy), and contributing to the Aquaculture Stewardship Council's (ASC) Shrimp Welfare Technical Working Group.
- Humane Slaughter Initiative: This work in particular seems to be our most promising work so far, and we Guesstimate that our work [...]
Outline:
(06:06) Our Work So Far
(06:18) Corporate Engagement
(07:35) Farmer Support
(08:54) Research
(10:58) Raising Issue Salience
(12:16) What Were Doing Now
(12:37) Humane Slaughter Initiative
(14:54) Sustainable Shrimp Farmers of India (SSFI)
(16:22) Shrimp Welfare Index
(18:24) What We Arent Doing
(19:21) Wild-Caught
(22:00) Specialisation work
(25:12) ”Shrimp-Inclusive” work
(27:45) How You Can Help
(27:48) Funding
(28:17) ASC stakeholder consultation
(29:27) Volunteer or work with us
(30:21) Newsletter and social media
(30:57) Start a “shrimp welfare project”
First published:
September 25th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Qo3559TqP5BzoQyWX/two-years-of-shrimp-welfare-project-insights-and-impact-from
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In this post I talk about several strong non-epistemic incentives and issues that can influence people to pursue longtermist[1]career paths (and specifically x-risk reduction careers and AI safety[2]) for EA community members.
For what it's worth, I personally I am sympathetic to longtermism, and to people who want to create more incentives for longtermist careers, because of the high urgency some assign to AI Safety and the fact that longtermism is a relatively new field. I am currently running career support pilots to support early-career longtermists.) However I think it's important to think carefully about career choices, even when it's difficult. I'm worried that these incentives lead people to feel (unconscious & conscious) pressure to pursue (certain) longtermist career paths even if it may not be the right choice for them. I think it's good for to be thoughtful about cause prioritization and career choices, especially for people earlier in their [...]
Outline:
(01:00) Incentives
(01:04) Good pay and job security
(02:04) Funding in an oligopoly
(03:54) It's easier to socially defer
(05:02) High status
(06:49) Role models and founder's effects
(07:46) Availability
(09:15) Support
(09:54) Transferable career capital
(10:28) Conclusion and Suggestions
The original text contained 18 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SWfwmqnCPid8PuTBo/monetary-and-social-incentives-in-longtermist-careers
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In March of this year, 30,000 people, including leading AI figures like Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, signed a letter calling on AI labs to pause the training of AI systems. While it seems unlikely that this letter will succeed in pausing the development of AI, it did draw substantial attention to slowing AI as a strategy for reducing existential risk.
While initial work has been done on this topic (this sequence links to some relevant work), many areas of uncertainty remain. I’ve asked a group of participants to discuss and debate various aspects of the value of advocating for a pause on the development of AI on the EA Forum, in a format loosely inspired by Cato Unbound.
- On September 16, we will launch with three posts:
- David Manheim will share a post giving an overview of what a pause would include, how a pause would work, and some possible concrete steps [...]
First published:
September 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6SvZPHAvhT5dtqefF/debate-series-should-we-push-for-a-pause-on-the-development
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Earlier today, Will MacAskill stepped down from the board of Effective Ventures UK[1], having served as a trustee since its founding more than a decade ago.
Will has been intending to step down for several months and announced his intention to do so earlier this year. Will had initially planned to remain on the board until we brought on additional trustees to replace him. However, given that our trustee recruitment process has taken longer than anticipated, and given also that Will continues to be recused from a significant proportion of board business[2], he felt that it didn’t make sense for him to stay on any longer.
Will announced his resignation today.
As a founding board member of EV UK (then called CEA), Will played a vital role in getting EV and its constituent projects off the ground, including co-founding Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours. We are very grateful [...]
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 21st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mArisdpuQiFtTNWw3/will-macaskill-has-stepped-down-as-trustee-of-ev-uk
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
tl;dr: Advocacy to the public is a large and neglected opportunity to advance AI Safety. AI Safety as a field is unfamiliar with advocacy, and it has reservations, some founded and others not. A deeper understanding of the dynamics of social change reveals the promise of pursuing outside game strategies to complement the already strong inside game strategies. I support an indefinite global Pause on frontier AI and I explain why Pause AI is a good message for advocacy. Because I’m American and focused on US advocacy, I will mostly be drawing on examples from the US. Please bear in mind, though, that for Pause to be a true solution it will have to be global.
The case for advocacy in general
Advocacy can work
I’ve encountered many EAs who are skeptical about the role of advocacy in social change. While it is difficult to prove causality in social phenomena like this [...]
Outline:
(00:46) The case for advocacy in general
(00:50) Advocacy can work
(02:32) We can now talk to the public about AI risk
(03:22) What having the public's support gets us
(05:17) Social change works best inside and outside the system
(09:31) Pros and potential pitfalls of advocacy
(09:35) Other pros of advocacy
(11:11) Misconceptions about advocacy
(13:23) Downsides to advocacy
(14:26) Downside risks of continuing the status quo
(15:59) The case for advocating AI Pause
(16:31) Pros and pitfalls of AI Pause
(21:09) How AI Pause advocacy can effect change
(24:01) Audience questions
First published:
September 20th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y4SaFM5LfsZzbnymu/the-case-for-ai-safety-advocacy-to-the-public
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I don't have much time to get into this, but I heard rumblings, saw a post, and wrote a comment, and now I'm making a post of my own because this information feels worth spreading now. I will not be going into much more details, for reasons that should be obvious.
For those that don't know me, I'm a therapist who has been working in the community for about 5 years now, and has been almost exclusively working with the community since early 2020, though I've been scaling down my therapy practice to focus on other projects like therapist recruitment/supervision, and mental health research. I also do mediation now and then, and in both situations, Community Health has been incredibly helpful.
Another of my major things is teaching at various rationality camps and workshops for high-school age students, as well as some for adults. To say that Community Health has been valuable [...]
First published:
September 19th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/78A2NHL3zBS3ESurp/my-life-would-be-much-harder-without-the-community-health
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Personal opinion only. Inspired by filling out the Meta coordination forum survey.
Epistemic status: Very uncertain, rough speculation. I’d be keen to see more public discussion on this question
One open question about the EA community is it's relationship to AI safety (see e.g. MacAskill). I think the relationship EA and AI safety (+ GHD & animal welfare) previously looked something like this (up until 2022ish):
With the growth of AI safety, I think the field now looks something like this:
It's an open question whether the EA Community should further grow the AI safety field, or whether the EA Community should become a distinct field from AI safety. I think my preferred approach is something like: EA and AI safety grow into new fields rather than into eachother:
- AI safety grows in AI/ML communities
- EA grows in other specific causes, as well as an “EA-qua-EA” movement.
As an ideal state, I could imagine the EA [...]
First published:
September 18th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/opCxiPwxFcaaayyMB/relationship-between-ea-community-and-ai-safety
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
When talking to newcomers to the field of biosecurity, I often felt annoyed that there wasn't a single introductory resource I could point them to that gives an overview of all the biosecurity-relevant organizations, upskilling opportunities, and funders.
With the help of a lot of contributors, I started this Google doc to provide such a resource. I'm sure that we missed some relevant organizations, and it'd be lovely if some people were to comment on the doc with additional information!
I'll copy the current version below, but please check out the link to the doc if you want to comment and see the most up-to-date version in the future!
Contributors: Max Görlitz, Simon Grimm, Andreas Prenner, Jasper Götting, Anemone Franz, Eva Siegmann, & more
Introduction
I would like to see something like aisafety.world for biosecurity. There already exists the Map of Biosecurity Interventions, but I want one for organizations!
This is a work-in-progress attempt to [...]
Outline:
(01:25) Policy
(01:28) Think tanks
(01:31) Europe
(04:30) USA
(07:11) (Inter)governmental actors
(07:15) USA
(08:25) Europe
(09:21) International actors
(11:49) Technical RandD
(12:26) GCBR-focused non-profits
(14:06) Relevant for-profits
(14:27) Academic labs
(14:31) Upskilling (fellowships)
(14:35) Focused on newcomers
(15:44) E-learning resources
(16:42) Focused on people with some experience
(20:32) Funders of work on biorisk mitigation
(20:36) Major funders explicitly focused on catastrophic biorisk
(22:17) Smaller funders with some part of their portfolio dedicated to catastrophic biorisk
(23:33) Funders that are focused on pandemic preparedness more broadly
First published:
September 17th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/28iXeSY75aLsqAagg/map-of-the-biosecurity-landscape-list-of-gcbr-relevant-orgs
Linkpost URL:
https://bit.ly/biosecurity-map
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Should we lobby governments to impose a moratorium on AI research? Since we don’t enforce pauses on most new technologies, I hope the reader will grant that the burden of proof is on those who advocate for such a moratorium. We should only advocate for such heavy-handed government action if it's clear that the benefits of doing so would significantly outweigh the costs.[1] In this essay, I’ll argue an AI pause would increase the risk of catastrophically bad outcomes, in at least three different ways:
- Reducing the quality of AI alignment research by forcing researchers to exclusively test ideas on models like GPT-4 or weaker.
- Increasing the chance of a “fast takeoff” in which one or a handful of AIs rapidly and discontinuously become more capable, concentrating immense power in their hands.
- Pushing capabilities research underground, and to countries with looser regulations and safety requirements.
Along the way, I’ll introduce an argument for optimism [...]
Outline:
(01:09) Feedback loops are at the core of alignment
(01:54) Alignment and robustness are often in tension
(03:21) Alignment is doing pretty well
(04:30) Alignment research was pretty bad during the last “pause”
(06:31) Fast takeoff has a really bad feedback loop
(08:43) Slow takeoff is the default (so don’t mess it up with a pause)
(09:25) Alignment optimism: AIs are white boxes
(09:49) Human and animal alignment is black box
(11:41) Status quo AI alignment methods are white box
(13:25) White box alignment in nature
(15:35) Realistic AI pauses would be counterproductive
(15:56) Realistic pauses are not international
(18:19) Realistic pauses don’t include hardware
(19:23) Hardware overhang is likely
(20:58) Likely consequences of a realistic pause
The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 16th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JYEAL8g7ArqGoTaX6/ai-pause-will-likely-backfire
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I’m Catherine, and I'm one of the Community Liaisons working in CEA's Community Health and Special Projects Team. This is a personal post about my career.
I’m somewhat to the right of the main age peak of the EA community😬 .So I’ve had a lot of time to make mistakes sub-optimal choices in my career. It has been a long and odd road from my childhood/teenage dream to become a train driver, Department of Conservation ranger, vet and then physicist.
Train I planned to drive. Endangered parrot I planned to help make less endangered.Before I got into EA
Fluke 1: Born into immense privilege by global standards (and reasonable privilege by rich country standards)
Mistake 1: Not doing something with that privilege. I wish someone (maybe me?) sat me down and said (maybe a more polite version of)“You know which part of the bell curve you’re on. Try doing something more useful for the [...]
Outline:
(00:42) Before I got into EA
(00:46) Fluke 1: Born into immense privilege by global standards (and reasonable privilege by rich country standards)
(00:54) Mistake 1: Not doing something with that privilege. I wish someone (maybe me?) sat me down and said (maybe a more polite version of)“You know which part of the bell curve you’re on. Try doing something more useful for the world!”.
(01:35) Good call 1: I talked to other students in the research group before choosing a PhD supervisor
(01:58) Mistake 2: Mistaking my interest in the ideas with interest in the day to day work
(02:17) Mistake 3: Not giving up sooner
(02:59) Mistake 4: Not exploring more options (even though they were scary)
(03:14) Good Call 2: Got really good at a valuable(ish) thing, and then used that as leverage to branch out a little
(03:54) After learning about EA
(04:03) Good call 3: I didn’t let my age put me off changing careers
(04:40) Good call 4: I reliably did stuff that seemed to need doing, even if they were boring, low status, or unpaid. I tried to be of service to others.
(05:46) Mistake 5: Thought too narrowly about my absolute advantage and didnt consider where my largest impact was.
(07:15) Good Call 5: I took a scary step - quitting my secure job without another guaranteed paid opportunity lined up (but with runway and a plan Z).
(07:48) Mistake 6: Not giving up sooner (again)
(08:12) Mistake 7: Over updating on a few rejections
(09:19) Fluke 2: Stumbling into a role at the Groups team at CEA
(09:44) Good call 6 (the best call): Doing what people I trusted thought would be most valuable
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 15th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/w59DkYCJYqaYDpEqG/mistakes-flukes-and-good-calls-i-made-in-my-multiple-careers
--- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We'd love ideas for 1) who to interview and 2) what topics to cover (even if you don't have a particular expert in mind for that topic) on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
Some prompts that might help generate guest ideas:
- What 'big ideas' books have you read in the last 5 years that were truly good? (e.g. the Secret of Our Success)
- Who gave that EAG(x) talk that blew your mind? (you can find recorded EAG(x) talks here)
- What's an important EA Forum post that you've read that could be more accessible, or more widely known?
- Who's an expert in your field who would do a great job communicating about their work?
- What's an excellent in-the-weeds nonfiction book you've read in the last few years that might be relevant to a pressing world problem? (e.g. Chip War)
- Who's appeared on our show in the past that you'd like to hear more from? (complete list of episodes [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 13th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RvafKqEYndLrnrGjm/who-should-we-interview-for-the-80-000-hours-podcast
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Some effective altruists focus on their donations, or just follow EA as a matter of intellectual pursuit. But for those who want to do direct work in an organisation, finding a job is not usually easy. This is also a big reason why a lot of people simply do not even consider looking for a job in an EA organisation in the first place.
We think that a considerable number of effective altruists who couldn’t or didn’t even try to get a job in EA organisations (due to high competition, lack of expertise, or distant location) may be overlooking extremely impactful career opportunities in animal advocacy. In this post, we’ll show how these career opportunities might be a good fit for many effective altruists that experience similar difficulties and bottlenecks in their career.
We are not claiming that effective altruists should necessarily pursue a job in EA organisations, or stop [...]
Outline:
(01:20) Challenges in securing EA jobs
(03:33) There are high impact opportunities available in the animal advocacy space
(04:58) Animal advocacy organisations need more talent
(06:41) Some upsides related to animal advocacy careers
(06:46) You don’t necessarily need to have a certain degree
(07:40) You don’t necessarily need to be a seasoned activist or vegan
(08:28) Not being born and raised in very high income countries is not a disadvantage, in most cases it's a plus
(10:12) Financial compensation is good, especially relative to Low and Middle Income Countries’ median wages
(11:57) You can start working part-time or begin a side project
(12:40) You can also found your own organisation
(14:31) Ending note: getting a job in animal advocacy is also not easy and involves many uncertainties in terms of delivering impact for animals.
(15:38) Interested? You can apply for a career advising session
First published:
September 13th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/y6BGJGgDDCfospuXE/difficult-to-get-a-job-in-ea-not-living-in-the-west-animal
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Sometimes in discussions of foreign aid or charity I see people raise the point that aid might do good directly, such as by providing a health service, but that it might cause harm indirectly, for example by allowing an incompetent or corrupt state to continue existing without being forced to become better by harsh economic realities. These arguments come up in conversation, and also in books by the likes of Angus Deaton or Larry Temkin. Recently, Martha Nussbaum brought up these concerns. They're worth taking seriously. Thankfully, political scientists and economists have in fact looked at them (somewhat) seriously.
In this post I'm going to tell you a tiny bit about me, explain the institutional criticism of aid in a bit more detail, and then explain the results of two papers testing this relationship. I'll also explain a tiny bit about the limitations of this kind of work. The upshot of [...]
Outline:
(01:19) All About Me
(02:23) Aid and institutions in theory
(04:17) Testing aids effect on institutions
(07:14) Should you believe either of these results?
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 13th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ohfknZmWG5uH8Jgqh/there-is-little-good-evidence-that-aid-systematically-harms
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Tl;dr: This is my very personal take on what it’s like to start and run a self-started charity. This job can be very interesting, fun, and high impact, but it’s also very challenging and it’s not for everyone.
Acknowledgments:
Thanks to Allison Anello, Christina Schmidt Ibanez and Constance Li for your valuable feedback and suggestions! 🙏
What’s my current job and how I got here:
Co-founder of Impactful Animal Advocacy (IAA) - an ecosystem of community, knowledge, and tools that supports a more coordinated and strategic animal advocacy movement.
I started this as a volunteer project in June 2022, first with a monthly newsletter then expanding to include a Slack community. Last month, I decided to work on IAA full-time after seeing significant community growth and a path for counterfactual impact.
Who is this post fo
People who are interested in starting a charity or people who are curious about what it’s like.
As a [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 13th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nAgJSGgdA67xun8MM/writing-about-my-job-co-founder-of-a-new-charity-early-stage
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Inspired by Aaron Gertler’s notes on hiring a copyeditor for CEA and more recently ERA’s hiring retrospective, I am writing a retrospective on Giving What We Can’s hiring for the Research Communicator role. This is written in my capacity as a Researcher for Giving What We Can. I helped drive the hiring process along with several other team members. The main motivation of the post is to:
- Provide more information for applicants on what the hiring process looked like internally.
- Share our lessons learned so that other organisations can improve their hiring processes by avoiding our mistakes and copying what we think we did well.
Summary
- We received ~145 applications from a diverse pool of candidates, and made one hire.
- We had four stages:
- An initial series of short answer questions — 24/145 moved to the next stage.
- A ~2-hour work test — 5/24 moved to the next stage.
- A work trial (11-hours total) — 2/5 moved to [...]
Outline:
(02:15) What we did
(02:28) Advertising the role
(03:46) The initial application
(07:42) The work test
(09:46) The work trial
(11:27) The interview and reference checks
(12:07) General reflection
First published:
September 13th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zrM2ktic2HEswAwry/hiring-retrospective-research-communicator-for-giving-what
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Overview
I’ve been a Philanthropy Advisor at GiveWell for two years. This role is a better job for me than I thought I could find, and GiveWell is a better workplace than I knew existed.
I’m often asked what a typical day in my role is like. Because my day to day is (delightfully) varied, I’ll instead share what a typical month looks like as a Philanthropy Advisor. I’ll also share some thoughts on my pathway to this role and its impact on GiveWell’s work.
A GiveWell Philanthropy Advisor is best compared to a Major Gifts Officer at other institutions, though there are some key differences. Big-picture, my role is to fundraise for our top charities as well as for non-top charity grants (such as those funded from our All Grants Fund) that may align with a specific donor’s priorities. I primarily do this by maintaining relationships with a portfolio of donors. [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Overview
(01:45) The job
(04:31) My path to the job
(05:40) Impact of the job
First published:
September 12th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6tkJtLMcmvW7vEXW7/about-my-job-givewell-philanthropy-advisor
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Tuberculosis is the world’s deadliest disease — and it is entirely curable.
The airborne disease has plagued human history, and the World Health Organization estimates that 10 million people across the globe are infected by TB every year. Of those millions, 1.6 million still die each year, despite the existence of life-saving technology and medicine.
These are facts that enrage many — but especially author and philanthropist John Green.
“Why am I passionate about TB? It’s the deadliest disease in human history, but for most of human history we couldn’t do much about it. However, since the mid-1950s, TB has been curable — yet we still allow TB to kill over 1.6 million people per year,” Green told Good Good Good.
“This is horrifying to me. I don’t want to accept a world where we know how to cure Tuberculosis but deny millions of people access to that cure.”
This passion was [...]
Outline:
(02:03) The Issue
(04:39) The Call To Action
(07:29) The Organizers
First published:
September 12th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P56q5epKjyN3eRJHq/john-green-and-grassroots-activists-pressure-danaher-to-drop
Linkpost URL:
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/john-green-danaher-tuberculosis
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a summary of the GPI Working Paper “High risk, low reward: A challenge to the astronomical value of existential risk mitigation” by David Thorstad. The paper is now forthcoming in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs. The summary was written by Riley Harris.
The value of the future may be vast. Human extinction, which would destroy that potential, would be extremely bad. Some argue that making such a catastrophe just a little less likely would be by far the best use of our limited resources--much more important than, for example, tackling poverty, inequality, global health or racial injustice.[1] In “High risk, low reward: A challenge to the astronomical value of existential risk mitigation”, David Thorstad argues against this conclusion. Suppose the risks really are severe: existential risk reduction is important, but not overwhelmingly important. In fact, Thorstad finds that the case for reducing existential risk is stronger when the [...]
Outline:
(01:12) The simple model
(02:17) Modifying the simple model
(02:54) Enduring effects
(03:20) Higher risk
(04:17) Value increases
(05:06) The time of perils
(05:45) Argument 1: humanity’s growing wisdom
(06:19) Argument 2: existential risk is a Kuznets curve
(07:37) Argument 3: planetary diversification
(08:08) Conclusion
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 12th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XEx8cWvvSofsScaoC/summary-high-risk-low-reward-a-challenge-to-the-astronomical
Linkpost URL:
https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/david-thorstad-high-risk-low-reward-a-challenge-to-the-astronomical-value-of-existential-risk-mitigation-2/
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The EU has an open funding call for overall €65million for start-ups in the built environment and PPE space (covering UV-C, air circulation/aerosol capture systems and next-generation face masks).
Grants (up to €2.5mn for innovation development costs) and direct equity investments (up to €15 million for scale up and other relevant costs) are available to businesses (or potentially subsidiaries) registered in the EU and associated countries (= EU neighbourhood countries like Norway; UK companies only eligible for the grants part, Swiss companies ineligible). Starting up a new company or relying on existing companies for a funding application could be options.
Applications close on 4 October 2023.
First published:
September 12th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jvkcNg4X2u8PJQjot/eur65million-eu-funding-for-far-uv-and-ppe-start-ups
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We just published an interview: Alex Lawsen on avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career. You can click through for the audio, a full transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
I think the key consideration that I end up highlighting to people who I think are trying to do the best thing right now is something like: It might be that setting yourself up well to do more good later looks like not directly having as much of an impact right now.
Because probably learning is pretty good if you want to have an impact later. Probably getting some signalling experience for a lot of careers, maybe doing a prestigious internship, maybe getting paid a lot of money: these things just often pay off later, and often trade off against doing the very most good with the summer internship you’re doing [...]
Outline:
(00:24) Episode summary
(02:50) Why you shouldnt just do whatever 80k says is best
(05:27) Trying harder to fail
(09:30) Why you shouldnt optimise for impact *now*
(15:11) How to stop constantly considering other career options
(20:03) Going too far in a good direction
First published:
September 11th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/32LmGryHhsCYcvr72/avoiding-10-mistakes-people-make-when-pursuing-a-high-impact
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
At Probably Good, our mission is to help more people maximize the impact of their career based on their own values, personal circumstances, and motivations. In the past few months, we’ve made many exciting strides towards fulfilling this mission – like launching our 1-on-1 advising calls, renovating and rebranding our site, and publishing several new in-depth career profiles and career guide chapters. Though we’re still a relatively new org, we’re learning a lot and striving to create high-quality content for a range of preferences and cause areas (be on the lookout for a whole lot of climate-focused career content in the next month!).
We think this sort of guidance can be extremely helpful in navigating your career search (it’s why we do it!). But we also know that life is complex and unpredictable. Planning and strategizing for your career is super important, but so is chance, failure and learning along the [...]
Outline:
(01:14) Anna Beth, Writer
(02:32) Dylan, Researcher
(03:21) Itamar, Head of Growth
(04:10) Omer, Co-Founder and CEO
(05:10) Sella, Co-Founder and Head of Research
(06:16) Thane, Operations Lead
First published:
September 11th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NBkiCgwn435RgGRmB/career-advice-the-probably-good-team-would-give-our-younger
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I've greatly enjoyed reading the other posts from Career Conversations Week. I think these types of conversations can be incredibly helpful. I thought I would add my perspective as an academic that thinks of themselves as EA-adjacent.
Basic information: I am an Assistant Professor of Accounting at Mississippi State University. I think a good framework for thinking about accounting scholarship is as an area of applied economics - we use the same theories/methods as economists, we are just focused on the role of accounting information specifically (and accounting topics such as auditing and taxation). My research agenda is pretty niche within accounting research - I study nonprofit organizations, which is why I have learned about and started to become involved with EA. A lot of what I am working on focuses on the donor decision-making process and how to encourage more impactful giving.
Background:
- I have undergraduate degrees in accounting and economics, and [...]
First published:
September 11th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c5BPGmDxYGhgqxyb2/writing-about-my-job-academic-researcher
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
https://www.ft.com/content/710bd8e9-19a8-47aa-8c88-cde67308fb49
First published:
September 11th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TqAxoYPSYhpv7FP6c/link-eu-considers-dropping-stricter-animal-welfare-measures
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Citation: Romero Waldhorn, D., & Autric, E. (2022, December 21). Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/b8n3t
Summary
- Decapod crustaceans or, for short, decapods[1] (e.g., crabs, shrimp, or crayfish) represent a major food source for humans across the globe. If these animals are sentient, the growing decapod production industry likely poses serious welfare concerns for these animals.
- Information about the number of decapods used for food is needed to better assess the scale of this problem and the expected value of helping these animals.
- In this work we estimated the number of shrimp and prawns farmed and killed in a year, given that they seem to be the vast majority of decapods used in the food system.
- We estimated that around:
- 440 billion (90% subjective confidence interval [SCI]: 300 billion - 620 billion) farmed shrimp are killed per year, which vastly exceeds the figure of the most numerous farmed vertebrates used [...]
Outline:
(07:47) Methods
(08:56) Farmed shrimp estimates
(11:50) Wild-caught shrimp estimates
(16:36) Total shrimp estimates
(16:51) Results
(16:54) Farmed shrimp
(22:45) Wild shrimp
(27:19) Total shrimp estimates
(29:39) Discussion
(38:58) Conclusion
(40:10) Acknowledgments
(41:12) References
(57:17) Appendix
(57:20) Farmed shrimp estimates
(01:07:05) Wild-caught shrimp estimates
The original text contained 29 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 10th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Fhoq7tP9LYPqaJDxx/shrimp-the-animals-most-commonly-used-and-killed-for-food
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Dear EA,
I love you. In hindsight, my life before we met looks like it was designed to prepare me for you, like Fate left her fingerprints on so many formative books and conversations. Yet, for all that preparation, when my friend finally introduced us, I almost missed you! "Earning to give-me-a-break, am I right?" I didn't recognize you at first as the one I'd been looking for—I didn't even know I'd been looking. But that encounter made an indelible impression on me, one that eventually demanded a Proper Introduction, this time performed in your own words. At second sight, I could make out the form of the one I am now privileged to know so well.
We survived the usual stages: talking, seeing each other casually, managing a bit of long (inferential) distance. It has been said that love is about changing and being changed—Lord, how I've changed. And you have [...]
First published:
September 10th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/x9siFYXhgHcipEwT7/a-love-letter-to-ea
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Intro
Recent 80k guest and philosopher specializing in AI consciousness Rob Long (@rgb) and co-author Jeff Sebo (@jeffsebo) recently participated in a panel discussion on their paper "Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness" (pdf).
You can watch it on Youtube (below), watch/listen as a podcast on Spotify [1], or read the transcript[2] below.
Paper abstract
Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing existing AI systems in detail, in light of our best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. We survey several prominent scientific theories of consciousness, including recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and attention schema theory. From these theories we derive "indicator properties" of consciousness, elucidated in computational terms that allow us to assess AI systems for these properties. [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Intro
(00:33) Paper abstract
(01:38) Youtube description
(01:50) About the event
(02:52) About the panelists
(05:04) About the host
(05:53) Transcript
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 9th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pNhc3jensyBY4Hz6u/panel-discussion-on-ai-consciousness-with-rob-long-and-jeff
Linkpost URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YC-ZhdcVck
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I’m the “Content Specialist” on the Online Team at the CEA.[1] I’ve been in this role since early 2022. People often don’t know what “Content Specialist” means[2] and it seems useful to have more “about my job” posts, so here’s mine.
This got long, so I encourage you to skip to whatever you want to see. I include my background, what I actually work on, and some quick reflections (what I value about the role, what’s been hard, and the skills that I develop).
This Maurice Sendak-style fox is shown with 5 legs, but I kind of like that. Jobs are weird, and I've loved lamassu statues since I was a kid (they have 5 legs, too).My background & how I got here
This ended up longer than expected, so tl;dr: math and comparative literature double major, helping to organize 3 summers of Canada/USA Mathcamp, getting into EA, research fellowship at Rethink Priorities [...]
Outline:
(00:47) My background and how I got here
(04:06) What I actually work on
(09:24) Reflecting on the role
The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y4653ehdHEZs4Y6Hp/about-my-job-content-specialist
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In March of this year, 30,000 people, including leading AI figures like Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, signed a letter calling on AI labs to pause the training of AI systems. While it seems unlikely that this letter will succeed in pausing the development of AI, it did draw substantial attention to slowing AI as a strategy for reducing existential risk.
While initial work has been done on this topic (this sequence links to some relevant work), many areas of uncertainty remain. I’ve asked a group of participants to discuss and debate various aspects of the value of advocating for a pause on the development of AI on the EA Forum, in a format loosely inspired by Cato Unbound.
- On September 16, we will launch with three posts:
- David Manheim will share a post giving an overview of what a pause would include, how a pause would work, and some possible concrete steps [...]
First published:
September 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6SvZPHAvhT5dtqefF/debate-series-should-we-push-for-a-pause-on-the-development
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
There has already been ample discussion of what norms and taboos should exist in the EA community, especially over the past ten months. Below, I'm sharing an incomplete list of actions and dynamics I would strongly encourage EAs and EA organizations to either strictly avoid or treat as warranting a serious—and possibly ongoing—risk analysis.
I believe there is a reasonable risk should EAs:
- Live with coworkers, especially when there is a power differential and especially when there is a direct report relationship
- Date coworkers, especially when there is a power differential and especially when there is a direct report relationship
- Promote[1] drug use among coworkers, including legal drugs, and including alcohol and stimulants
- Live with their funders/grantees, especially when substantial conflict-of-interest mechanisms are not active
- Date their funders/grantees, especially when substantial conflict-of-interest mechanisms are not active
- Date the partner of their funder/grantee, especially when substantial conflict-of-interest mechanisms are not active
- Retain someone as a full-time contractor or grant recipient [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MvwctfyZ9NrhPzyPj/an-incomplete-list-of-things-i-think-eas-probably-shouldn-t
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TLDR: This post is part of a sequence we’ve prepared for the Career Conversations Week on the EA Forum. This article provides a concise overview of the traits that Charity Entrepreneurship deems most valuable for a career in nonprofit entrepreneurship. We intend to provide you with a deeper understanding of our criteria when evaluating applications for our Incubation Program. Additionally, we hope this post assists you in self-assessing whether this career path aligns with your aspirations and abilities.
It’s been five years since we started our Incubation Program. We’ve since incubated 27 charities, some of which are now GiveWell incubated or ACE recommended, with many others on a path to becoming leaders in their fields. This would be impossible without dedicated, smart, resilient, and ambitiously altruistic individuals like you. Of course, not everyone is suited to be a successful nonprofit entrepreneur, and so we’ve spent the last few years refining our [...]
Outline:
(02:39) Competence:
(03:54) Personality Traits:
(05:58) Upskilling as You Go:
(07:48) Potential Obstacles in this Career Path
First published:
September 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/y7hk2zABZ2nvqDs5z/who-is-a-good-fit-for-a-career-in-nonprofit-entrepreneurship
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We’re the 80,000 Hours Career Advising team, and you should ask us anything!
We are advisors at 80,000 Hours! Ask us anything about careers and career advising! (If you’re interested in us personally or other things about 80k we might also answer those.) We’ll answer questions on September 13th (British time), so please post questions before then. Unfortunately, we might not be able to get to all the questions, depending on how much time we end up having and what else is asked. So be sure to upvote the questions you most want answered :)
Logistics/practical instructions:
- Please post your questions as comments on this post. The earlier you share your questions, the easier it will be for us to get to them.
- We’ll probably answer questions on September 13th. Questions posted after that aren’t likely to get answers.
Some context:
- You have 80,000 hours in your career. This makes it your best [...]
First published:
September 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZwswpxAWMZ8F7CvtB/ama-80-000-hours-career-advising-team
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A lot of people aren't sure what to expect when they apply for 80,000 Hours coaching calls. We thought it might be helpful to give you some context.
Who can we help?
- We love when people form inside views on issues, and question ideas that don't make sense to them. So we encourage you to apply for advising even if you don't agree with everything on the 80k website.
- However, we’re most able to help people who are open to working on some of the top problems we list on our site, or something in a related area. We think most of our impact comes from helping people who end up working in these areas, and since they’re the topics we focus on, our advice is best for applicants who could potentially take relevant career paths.
- We’re best able to help people who are mid or early career, with some idea of what they want to do [...]
Outline:
(00:14) Who can we help?
(01:09) Ways you can get value from an 80k call
(02:36) Before the call
(03:15) During the call
(04:47) Areas of special expertise
(06:42) Things that usually dont happen on calls
(07:23) If in doubt, apply!
First published:
September 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6dPecDMarq3pm3Fbx/what-happens-on-an-80-000-hours-call
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Many of us know very little about what people in different roles actually do or how they got there. There's a good chance that you have experience that other Forum users would be interested in; so consider writing about your job! (Especially since Career Conversations Week is starting.)
Here are some existing "job profile" posts that you can explore.
(This post is somewhat redundant with Aaron's, but I hope it's a useful reminder.)
Why write about your job
Jobs are mysterious, and it’s pretty hard to get good information about jobs that you don’t happen to know about already.
I can present my experience as evidence for this claim. When I was finishing college, I was pretty clueless about my post-college options and kind of defaulted to graduate school (which was the main thing I knew).[1] I had realized my lack of knowledge was a problem, so I asked friends for advice. Someone [...]
Outline:
(00:31) Why write about your job
(04:05) Notes and tips on writing about your job
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nyRwGEepTfb2EJMeF/writing-about-your-job-is-still-great-consider-doing-it
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
One example of the evidence we’re gathering
We are working hard on a point-by-point response to Ben’s article, but wanted to provide a quick example of the sort of evidence we are preparing to share:
Her claim: “Alice claims she was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”
The truth (see screenshots below):
- There was vegan food in the house (oatmeal, quinoa, mixed nuts, prunes, peanuts, tomatoes, cereal, oranges) which we offered to cook for her.
- We were picking up vegan food for her.
Months later, after our relationship deteriorated, she went around telling many people that we starved her. She included details we believe were strategically chosen to depict us in a maximally damaging light - what could be more abusive than refusing to care [...]
First published:
September 7th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5pksH3SbQzaniX96b/a-quick-update-from-nonlinear
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The Mental Health Funding Circle is holding our fall grants round!
We are a group of funders seeking to fund the most impactful mental health projects, and we very much encourage you to apply.
Our scope is quite wide, and we would consider many projects related to the cause of mental health. In the past we have funded:
- Meta research on mental health giving priorities
- Targeted research on intervention effectiveness and data on LMIC mental health
- Effective global mental health interventions such as task-shifting, stepped care or self-help guides
- Mental health for the EA community
Applications are due on October 1st, and final decisions will be made early-mid November.
- For more information on the MHFC, visit our website.
- For a list of previous grants, see our Updates page.
- To apply, complete this application by October 1st.
The Mental Health Funding Circle is an Impactful Grantmaking funding circle, a project of Charity Entrepreneurship.
First published:
September 7th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/su24dN2aXYjY7XDZZ/mhfc-fall-grants-round
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a long (>9000 word) essay written by myself (Saloni Dattani), Rachel Glennerster and Siddhartha Haria for Works in Progress.
Over half a million people die from malaria each year, but it took 141 years to develop a vaccine for it.
One fundamental reason for this was the scientific complexity of the pathogen – malaria is caused by a parasite, not a virus or bacteria. But another, repeated obstacle was a lack of financial incentive and urgency.
In this piece, which includes a lot of data and charts, we tell the story of how the malaria vaccine was developed, why the financial market for the vaccine was missing, and how it could have been sped up with smarter incentives and market mechanisms, like Advance Market Commitments.
About the authors:
- Saloni Dattani - I'm a researcher on global health at Our World in Data and a founding editor of Works in Progress
- Rachel Glennerster is associate [...]
First published:
September 7th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tumiQumHi6crL8Mnv/why-we-didn-t-get-a-malaria-vaccine-sooner-and-what-we-can
Linkpost URL:
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-didnt-get-a-malaria-vaccine-sooner
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a rough write-up of the results of all the HIPsy pilot activities, outcomes, and suggestions on what to do next.
Below, you can find links to created resources for those involved in psychology or mental health who aim to maximize their impact. Additionally, there are results from events and surveys highlighting which (other) resources might be most beneficial for enhancing their impact. You can learn more about the initial project and plan in this EA forum post.
Executive summary
- Within this EAIF- funded project, I ran three surveys to determine the demand for network activities, piloted 5 events at EAGx’s, and collaborated with others on highly requested materials. Below, you can find the results of these activities.
- Main outcomes
- Importance/general Demand:
Roughly twice as many people expressed interest in mental health as a cause area (N = 164) compared to those interested in resources for individuals with a background in psychology or [...]
- Importance/general Demand:
Outline:
(00:34) Executive summary
(03:09) Outcomes
(06:07) Summary of Survey Results
(15:00) Thanks
First published:
September 7th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hBytccap5GvqgBxo4/pilot-results-high-impact-psychology-mental-health-hipsy
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Epistemic status: Once I started actively looking into things, much of my information in the post below came about by a search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders, not from a search to give a balanced picture of its overall costs and benefits. I think standard update rules suggest not that you ignore the information, but you think about how bad you expect the information would be if I selected for the worst, credible info I could share, and then update based on how much worse (or better) it is than you expect I could produce. (See section 5 of this post about Mistakes with Conservation of Expected Evidence for more on this.) This seems like a worthwhile exercise for at least non-zero people to do in the comments before reading on. (You can condition on me finding enough to be worth sharing, but also note that I think [...]
Outline:
(10:09) A High-Level Overview of The Employees’ Experience with Nonlinear
(16:25) An assortment of reported experiences
(40:59) Conversation with Nonlinear
(48:47) My thoughts on the ethics and my takeaways
The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 7th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/32LMQsjEMm6NK2GTH/sharing-information-about-nonlinear
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
CEARCH ran our Cause Exploration Contest over the month of July, as part of our search for (a) potentially impactful causes as well as (b) useful methodologies to search for new causes going forward. We would like to thank everyone in the EA and broader philanthropic community for participating.
Winning Entries
We are pleased to announce the following winning entries:
- In the category of promising cause areas: Bean soaking, submitted by Nick Laing of OneDay Health. In summary, persuading citizens in sub-Saharan Africa to soak before cooking them (and thus saving on fuel use) may have health, economic and environmental benefits; however, there are some outstanding uncertainties over tractability and why soaking is not already common practice.
- In the category of useful search methodologies: Brainstorming for solutions that may not have the most impact in the context of solving a single problem, but which may have significant overall impact given the benefits it brings [...]
Outline:
(00:27) Winning Entries
(01:29) Honourable Mentions
First published:
September 7th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kaTRzN6QxrQvXLWx4/cearch-s-cause-exploration-contest-awards
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
On 23rd August, Nick Beckstead stepped down from the boards of Effective Ventures UK and Effective Ventures US.
For context, EV UK and EV US host and fiscally sponsor several (mostly EA-related) projects, such as CEA, 80,000 Hours and various others (see more here).
Since November 2022, Nick has been recused from all board matters related to the collapse of FTX. Over time, it became clear that Nick’s recusal made it difficult for him to add sufficient value to EV and its projects for it to be worth him remaining on the boards[1]. Nick and the other trustees felt that this was sufficient reason for Nick to step down.
Nick wanted to share the following:
Ever since the collapse of FTX, I've been recused from a substantial fraction of business on both boards. This has made it hard to contribute as much as I would like to as a board member, during a time [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Defu3jkejb7pmLjeN/nick-beckstead-is-leaving-the-effective-ventures-boards
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Editorial note
This report is a “shallow” investigation, as described here, and was commissioned by GiveWell and produced by Rethink Priorities from February to April 2023. We revised this report for publication. GiveWell does not necessarily endorse our conclusions, nor do the organizations represented by those who were interviewed.
The primary focus of the report is to provide an overview of market shaping in global health. We describe how market shaping is typically used, its recent track record, and ongoing gaps in its implementation. We also spotlight two specific market shaping approaches (pooled procurement and subscription models). Our research involved reviewing the scientific and gray literature and speaking to five experts.
We don’t intend this report to be Rethink Priorities’ final word on market shaping, and we have tried to flag major sources of uncertainty in the report. We hope this report galvanizes a productive conversation within the global health and development community [...]
Outline:
(00:09) Editorial note
(01:20) Key takeaways
(09:23) Acknowledgments
First published:
September 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xgE4uxy5EPRX2wFr2/an-overview-of-market-shaping-in-global-health-landscape-new
Linkpost URL:
https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/an-overview-of-market-shaping-in-global-health
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In which: I list 9 projects that I would work on if I wasn’t busy working on safety standards at ARC Evals, and explain why they might be good to work on.
Epistemic status: I’m prioritizing getting this out fast as opposed to writing it carefully. I’ve thought for at least a few hours and talked to a few people I trust about each of the following projects, but I haven’t done that much digging into each of these, and it’s likely that I’m wrong about many material facts. I also make little claim to the novelty of the projects. I’d recommend looking into these yourself before committing to doing them. (Total time spent writing or editing this post: ~8 hours.)
Standard disclaimer: I’m writing this in my own capacity. The views expressed are my own, and should not be taken to represent the views of ARC/FAR/LTFF/Lightspeed or any other org [...]
Outline:
(02:41) Relevant beliefs I have
(04:52) Technical AI Safety Research
(05:38) Ambitious mechanistic interpretability
(08:34) Late stage project management and paper writing
(09:53) Creating concrete projects and research agendas
(11:32) Grantmaking
(12:37) Working on Open Philanthropy’s Funding Bottlenecks
(14:24) Working on the other EA funders’ funding bottlenecks
(16:02) Chairing the Long-Term Future Fund
(17:28) Community Building
(17:54) Onboarding senior academics and research engineers
(20:05) Extending the young EA/AI researcher mentorship pipeline
(22:31) Writing blog posts or takes in general
The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 6th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zcHdehWJzDpfxJpmf/what-i-would-do-if-i-wasn-t-at-arc-evals
Linkpost URL:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6FkWnktH3mjMAxdRT/what-i-would-do-if-i-wasn-t-at-arc-evals
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
EA communities tend to be a professional space and a social space, all at once. This reality can often involve complex power dynamics that require careful attention. To maintain safe spaces, it is crucial to establish guiding rules for our communities. In this post, I would like to share EA Israel's concise code of conduct for preventing sexual harassment, which is based on Israeli law. Before diving into that, we suggest some practical steps you can take to promote the safety of your community.
What can you do to prevent sexual harassment in your EA community?
As a community manager
Designate a responsible person, either a team member or volunteer, dedicated to sexual harassment prevention and community health in your community. This person should be committed to this subject, ideally with some professional experience in dealing with emotionally challenging situation. Nominate another person, preferably from a different gender, as a contact person when [...]
Outline:
(00:38) What can you do to prevent sexual harassment in your EA community?
(00:44) As a community manager
(01:28) As a community health and preventing sexual harassment representative
(01:49) As a community member
(02:17) EA Israel’s Code of Conduct for preventing sexual harassment
(02:39) Prohibited acts according to the law
(04:05) Process for Filing a Complaint
(05:12) Handling the Complaint (Internal disciplinary procedure)
(07:02) Actions taken by Effective Altruism Israel to prevent sexual harassment
First published:
September 5th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6Z7SShHa5fnadLm3G/promoting-safety-in-ea-practical-steps-to-prevent-sexual
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC) is a non-profit think-tank, that has published economic cost-benefit analyses on global issues since 2004. It is headed by Bjørn Lomborg. In the chronological history of prominent effective altruists, I think he is the 2nd behind Peter Singer (but that's besides the point).
The CCC has high standards of research, and has employed top economists since its inception, including Nobel Prize winners. It has previously published large reports in 2o04, 2008, 2012 & 2015. It's recommendations were usually similar to the ones in the EA movement (child nutrition, immunization, malaria, deworming etc.), but with a larger focus on economic policy.
About 4 months ago, the CCC has published its Halftime for the Sustainable Development Goals 2016-2030.
A book based on this report has received good reviews from the chief economist of the world bank, Nobel Prize winning economist Vernon Smith, and Bill Gates. Anyways, the [...]
First published:
September 5th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vEcpYKoa9RWfGHyWo/copenhagen-consensus-center-s-newest-research-on-global
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In September 2022, we announced that we were developing Pulse, a large and repeated US-population survey focusing on public attitudes relevant to high impact issues.
This project was originally going to be supported by the FTX Future Fund and was therefore delayed while we sought alternative funding. We have now acquired alternative funding for this project for one year. However, the project will now be running on a quarterly basis, rather than monthly, to make the most efficient use of limited funds.
Request for questions
As such, we are now, again, soliciting requests for questions to include in the survey.
We are particularly interested in questions which people would value being tracked across time, since this will make the most use of Pulse’s nature as a quarterly survey. We will still likely include some one-off questions in Pulse (space permitting), and welcome requests of this kind, but in principle we could just [...]
First published:
September 4th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XWJcAEKYmNfodjnTL/re-announcing-pulse
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
From 2016 to 2019, 80,000 Hours’ core content was contained in our persistently popular career guide. (You may also remember it as the 80,000 Hours book: 80,000 Hours — Find a fulfilling career that does good).
Today, we’re re-launching that guide. Among many other changes, in the new version:
- We’ve substantially changed our recommendations on career capital.[1]
- We have significantly improved and extended our article on career planning.
- We improved our advice on personal fit and career exploration.
- We added sections on why community-building, government and policy, and organisation-building careers could be high impact.
- We focus more on avoiding harm (in line with our updates following the collapse of FTX), and explicitly discuss Sam Bankman-Fried when talking about earning to give.
- We are more upfront about 80,000 Hours’ focus on existential risk in particular (while also discussing a wide variety of cause areas, including global health, animal welfare, existential risk and meta-causes).[2]
- We’ve updated the more empirical sections of the guide using more up-to-date [...]
Outline:
(01:54) What’s in the guide?
(03:15) Advice (for EAs) on how to read the guide
(06:59) Why did we make this change?
(08:00) Has it been successful so far?
(08:21) How can you help?
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
September 4th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/f7D4spNoAYqhFfbBz/announcing-the-new-80-000-hours-career-guide
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I work as a Resident Assistant at my college. Last year, only a few weeks into me starting, I was called at night to come help with a drunk student. I didn’t actually help very much, and probably didn’t have to be there. I didn’t even have to write up the report at the end. At one point I went outside to let medical services into the building, but mostly I just stood in a hallway.
The person in question was so drunk they couldn’t move. They had puked in the bathroom and were lying in the hallway crying. They could barely talk. When Campus Safety arrived they kneeled down next to this person and helped them drink water, while asking the normal slew of questions about the person’s evening.
They asked this person, whose name I can’t even remember, why they had been drinking so much. They said, in between hiccups [...]
First published:
September 3rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/buFyakASucJnrZj7X/the-lives-we-can-save
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Hi folks, in this post we’d like to describe our views as the Chair (Peter) and Director (Michael) of HLI in light of the recent conversations around HLI’s work. The purpose of this post is to reflect on HLI’s work and its role within the EA community in response to community member feedback, highlight what we’re doing about it, and engage in further constructive dialogue on how HLI can improve moving forward.
HLI hasn’t always got things right. Indeed, we think there have been some noteworthy errors (quick note: our goal here isn’t to delve into details but to highlight broad lessons learnt, so this isn’t an exhaustive list):
- Most importantly, we were overconfident and defensive in communication, particularly around our 2022 giving season post.
- We described our recommendation for StrongMinds using language that was too strong: “We’re now in a position to confidently recommend StrongMinds as the most effective way we [...]
---
First published:
September 1st, 2023
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I sometimes get a vibe that many people trying to ambitiously do good in the world (including EAs) are misguided about what doing successful policy/governance work looks like. An exaggerated caricature would be activities like: dreaming up novel UN structures, spending time in abstract game theory and ‘strategy spirals[1]’, and sweeping analysis of historical case studies.
Instead, people that want to make the world safer with policy/governance should become experts on very specific and boring topics. One of the most successful people I’ve met in biosecurity got their start by getting really good at analyzing obscure government budgets.
Here are some crowdsourced example areas I would love to see more people become experts in:
- Legal liability - obviously relevant to biosecurity and AI safety, and I’m especially interested in how liability law would handle spreading infohazards (e.g. if a bio lab publishes a virus sequence that is then used for bioterrorism, or if [...]
The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 31st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/J7nmbqcWncPMZFhGC/want-to-make-a-difference-on-policy-and-governance-become-an
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This piece defends a strong form of epistemic modesty: that, in most cases, one should pay scarcely any attention to what you find the most persuasiv… ---
First published:
October 29th, 2017
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WKPd79PESRGZHQ5GY/in-defence-of-epistemic-modesty
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
For most people I don't think it's important to have a really precise definition of integrity. But if you really want to go all-in on consequentialis…
---
First published:
November 14th, 2016
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CfcvPBY9hdsenMHCr/integrity-for-consequentialists-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TL;DR:
- EAGs from 2022–2023 each cost around $2M–$3.6M USD at around $1.5k–2.5k per person per event.
- These events typically cost a lot because the fixed costs of running professional events in the US and UK are surprisingly high.
- We’re aiming to get these event costs down to ≤$2M each moving forwards.
- We’ve already started to cut back on spending and will continue to do so, whilst also raising default ticket prices to recoup more of our costs.
Throughout this post, for legibility I discuss the direct costs behind running our events and don’t include other indirect costs like staff salaries, software, and our office space (which would increase the costs below by ~25%).
Introduction
This year (2023), EAG Bay Area cost $2M and EAG London cost £2M (including travel grant costs).[1] Our most expensive event ever was EAG SF 2022, which cost $3.6M. This gives us a range of about $1.5–2.5k per person per event.[2]
In-person EAGx [...]
Outline:
(03:07) Venue and catering
(06:07) Other costs
(07:08) What are we doing to save money?
The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 26th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n5GJEP3tMrzdfYPGG/how-much-do-eags-cost-and-why
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
As we’ve been working on Squiggle, we’ve encountered many technical challenges for writing probabilistic functionality with Javascript. Some of these challenges are solved in Python and need to be ported over and some apply to all languages.
We think the following tasks could be good fits for others to tackle. These are fairly isolated and could be done in contained NPM packages or similar. The solutions would be useful for Squiggle and we suspect might be handy for others in the Javascript ecosystem as well. Advice and opinions are also appreciated.
This post was quickly written, as it's for a narrow audience and might get outdated. We're happy to provide more rigor and context if requested. If you are interested in taking any of them on and could use some guidance, let us know!
For those not themselves interested in contributing, this might be useful for giving people a better idea of [...]
Outline:
(01:00) 1. Density Estimation
(03:31) 2. Quantiles to Distributions, Maybe with Metalog
(04:22) 3. “Point Set” Formats
(08:39) 4. Scoring Heuristics, for General Point Set Distributions
(10:18) 5. D3 Scale Axes
(10:55) 6. Forced Distribution Correlations
(11:22) 7. Language Model Training
(11:40) 8. Distribution-Specific Tasks
(12:21) 9. Bonus: Relative Value Functions
First published:
August 26th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7aieQzPcBKxMGn9Xo/open-technical-challenges-around-probabilistic-programs-and
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Epistemic Status: Briefly written. The specific equation here captures my quick intuition - this is meant primarily as a demonstration.
There’s a lot of discussion on the EA Forum and LessWrong about epistemics, evidence, and updating.
I don’t know of many attempts at formalizing our thinking here into concrete tables or equations. Here is one (very rough and simplistic) attempt. I’d be excited to see much better versions.
Equation
Initial Points
Scientific Evidence
20 - A simple math proof proves X
8 - A published scientific study in Economics supporting X
6 - A published scientific study in Psychology supporting X
Market Prediction
14 - Popular stock markets strongly suggest X
11 - Prediction markets claim X, with 20 equivalent hours of research
10 - A poll shows that 90% of LessWrong believe X
6 - Prediction markets claim X, with one equivalent hour of research
Expert Opinion
8 - An esteemed academic believes X, where it’s directly in their line of work
6 - [...]
Outline:
(00:31) Equation
(00:34) Initial Points
(02:11) Point Modifiers
(02:53) Points, In Practice
(03:08) Meta
(03:11) Using an Equations for Discussion
(04:30) Presumptions
(04:57) Agreeing on an evidence-weighing algorithm before direct discussions
(05:58) Is this too complicated and speculative?
(06:44) Future Work
(08:12) Afterward: Quick Attempts by LLMS
(08:22) Claude
(10:12) GPT-4
First published:
August 25th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mrAZFnEjsQAQPJvLh/using-points-to-rate-different-kinds-of-evidence
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TL;DR: September 8 - 15 will feature more career-related discussions on the EA Forum: a “Career Conversations Week.”[1] This is an invitation to participate and a pre-announcement of some posts that will be published during the event. You can follow posts under this tag.
A wide range of topics would fit the theme; consider writing about what you actually do in your job (and how you got there), sharing advice about how to choose a path, etc. (some more ideas below).
You can always write about these topics on the EA Forum, but if you want someone to provide extra encouragement — or if you want to post about it when others are talking about it, too — this event is your chance.
A banner!What this actually is and why we’re running it
Much like EA Strategy Fortnight, this event is ultimately a push for discussions of a particular kind — in [...]
Outline:
(00:49) What this actually is and why we’re running it
(02:03) How you can participate
(02:30) If you write a post
(02:49) Example topics you could write about (you can add more in the comments!)
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 25th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FWmnwCcKiBLstFtYL/career-conversations-week-on-the-forum-8-15-september
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We are excited to announce that applications are now open for the Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics Course, starting in October!
The deadline for applications is 23:59 on 13th September 2023 (in whichever time zone you are in).
Overview
This is a 12-week, part-time, virtual course focusing on the technical and policy efforts to prevent, detect and respond to catastrophic pandemics. It brings together:
- An expert-curated curriculum covering topics from the history of pandemics to concrete policy and technical proposals to reduce pandemic risk.
- A community of scientists, policymakers and expert facilitators keen to learn about, discuss and collaborate on proposals to build a more biosecure future.
- Opportunities to pursue careers that enhance pandemic preparedness.
The course is free to participate in and you can read more details here.
Facilitating the course
If you’re already experienced in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, we’d strongly encourage you to apply to facilitate the course. You can find more details about facilitation here.
Logistical details
- The course [...]
Outline:
(00:24) Overview
(01:06) Facilitating the course
(01:21) Logistical details
(01:58) A note on information hazards
First published:
August 25th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PsrCsBNchRhvwNcQZ/applications-open-for-the-biosecurity-fundamentals-pandemics
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Nuclear winter is a topic that many have heard about, but where significant confusion can occur. I certainly knew little about the topic beyond the superficial prior to working on nuclear issues, and getting up to speed with the recent research is not trivial. Even then there are very large uncertainties around the topic, and different teams have come to different conclusions, which are unlikely to be resolved soon.
However, this does not mean that we cannot draw some conclusions on nuclear winter. I worry that the fact there are still uncertainties has been taken to the extreme that nuclear winters are impossible, which I do not believe can be supported. Instead, I would suggest the balance of evidence suggests there is a very serious risk a large nuclear exchange could lead to catastrophic climate impacts. Given that the potential mortality of these winters could exceed the direct deaths, the [...]
Outline:
(01:11) Headline results, for those short on time
(10:29) The case for concern: Firestorms, plumes and soot
(17:05) Complexities and disagreements
(21:23) Point one – How many detonations can we expect?
(29:08) Point two – How do detonations translate into stratospheric soot?
(33:22) The anatomy of the disagreements
(38:51) Synthesis
First published:
August 25th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pbMfYGjBqrhmmmDSo/nuclear-winter-reviewing-the-evidence-the-complexities-and
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Publication note
We initially drafted a writeup of these results in 2019, but decided against spending more time to finalize this draft for publication, given the large number of other projects we could counterfactually be working on, and given that our core results had already been reported (with permission) by Scott Alexander, which seemed to capture a large portion of the value of publishing.
We’re now releasing a lightly edited version of our initial draft, by request, so that our full results can be cited. As such, this is a ‘blog post’, not a research report, meaning it was produced quickly and is not to Rethink Priorities’ typical standards of substantiveness and careful checking for accuracy.
Summary
Scott Alexander reported the results of a small (n=50) experiment on a convenience sample of his Tumblr followers suggesting that the moral value assigned to animals of different species closely tracks their cortical neuron count (Alexander, 2019a). [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Publication note
(08:47) Our Study
(16:05) Results
(16:08) The Problem of Equivalence Refusals
(20:13) Median Values
(22:22) The Full Range of Responses
(25:29) Correlations between neuron count and moral value
(28:23) Conclusions
(32:36) Future work
The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 25th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3NvLqcQPjBeBHDjz6/perceived-moral-value-of-animals-and-cortical-neuron-count
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Topline summary points:
- Personal conversations/interactions are reported to be the most important influences in adopting a vegan or vegetarian diet, and most frequently also the first influence in getting someone interested in dietary change
- Interactions with animals also remain a strong source of influence
- Exposure to documentaries, social media, and online videos are also attributed considerable importance, particularly among more recent adopters, and those whose diet was vegan (rather than vegetarian)
- Concerns over animal welfare are rated as the most important reasons for adopting a vegetarian or vegan diet, though environmental and health concerns are also rated relatively highly - again especially among more recent adopters
Background
Decreasing animal-product consumption can have numerous benefits, from increasing the sustainability of the food system (Clark & Tilman, 2017) to reducing animal suffering (Broom, 2007; Bryant, 2019; Proctor et al., 2013; Wagner et al., 2015). Yet, dietary change can be challenging. Factors such as habit, familiarity, taste preferences, food [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Topline summary points:
(00:52) Background
(04:17) Method
(04:20) Participants and Procedure
(06:09) Survey items
(06:55) Results
(06:58) First influences on becoming vegetarian or vegan
(07:03) Raw outcomes
(07:47) Regression model
(11:47) Importance of different sources on becoming vegan or vegetarian
(11:53) Raw ratings
(13:08) Regression model
(14:29) Overarching motivations for becoming vegan or vegetarian
(14:35) Raw ratings
(15:14) Regression model
(16:34) Discussion
(19:55) Limitations
(21:11) Conclusion
(22:27) Appendix
(22:29) A. Probability of Superiority - Pairwise comparisons among influence of items
(22:39) Acknowledgements
First published:
August 24th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oWLT2L2ToxsNtKKnC/influences-on-individuals-adopting-vegetarian-and-vegan
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I spent a while at Rethink Priorities considering 'AI Safety Bounties' - programs where public participants or approved security researchers receive rewards for identifying issues within powerful ML systems (analogous to bug bounties in cybersecurity). I considered the benefits and risks of programs like this and suggested potential program models. This report is my takeaways from this process:
Short summary
Safety bounties could be valuable for legitimizing examples of AI risks, bringing more talent to stress-test systems, and identifying common attack vectors.
I expect safety bounties to be worth trialing for organizations working on reducing catastrophic AI risks. Traditional bug bounties seem fairly successful: they attract roughly one participant per $50 of prize money, and have become increasingly popular with software firms over time. The most analogous program for AI systems led to relatively few useful examples compared to other stress-testing methods, but one knowledgeable interviewee suggested that future programs could be significantly [...]
Outline:
(00:26) Short summary
(02:24) Long summary
(02:27) Introduction and bounty program recommendations
(07:16) Why and how to run AI safety bounties
(09:51) Other recommended practices for bounty organizers.
(11:00) Acknowledgements
First published:
August 24th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3rf99yiGhjDdBDeCJ/ai-safety-bounties
Linkpost URL:
https://rethinkpriorities.org/longtermism-research-notes/ai-safety-bounties
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Spoilers ahead — listen to the episode beforehand if you don’t want to hear a rough summary first. … ---
First published:
August 26th, 2016
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vQpk3cxdAe5RX9xzo/we-are-in-triage-every-second-of-every-day
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
- Zoe Williams used to manually do weekly summaries of the EA Forum and LessWrong, but now she doesn't
- today I strung together a bunch of google apps scripts, google sheets expressions, graphQL queries, and D3.js to automatically extract all the posts on EAF/LW from the last week with >50 karma, summarize them with GPT-4, and assemble the result into HTML with links and stuff
- hard to say what the API usage cost, what with all the tinkering and experimenting, but I reckon it was about $5
- there were a bunch of posts which were too long for the API message length, so as a first whack i just cut stuff out of the middle of the post until it fit (Procrustes style)
- Siao (co-author) was going to help but i finished everything so fast she never got a chance lol
- I haven't spent much time sanity-checking these summaries, but I reckon they're "good enough to [...]
Outline:
(02:19) EA Forum
(02:22) Select examples of adverse selection in longtermist grantmaking
(03:14) An Elephant in the Community Building room
(03:54) CE alert: 2 new interventions for February-March 2024 Incubation Program
(04:38) “Dimensions of Pain” workshop: Summary and updated conclusions
(05:20) Taking prioritisation within EA seriously
(06:05) EU farmed fish policy reform roadmap
(06:52) Longtermism Fund: August 2023 Grants Report
(07:31) Personal Reflections on Longtermism
(08:03) Corporate campaigns work: a key learning for AI Safety
(08:45) Probably Good published a list of impact-focused job-boards
(09:24) New probabilistic simulation tool
(09:59) Making EA more inclusive, representative, and impactful in Africa
(10:43) Impact obsession: Feeling like you never do enough good
(11:24) Why we should fear any bioengineered fungus and give fungi research attention
(12:11) Empowering Numbers: FEM since 2021
(12:49) My EA Journey
(13:20) Lesswrong
(13:23) Against Almost Every Theory of Impact of Interpretability
(14:00) 6 non-obvious mental health issues specific to AI safety
(14:45) Large Language Models will be Great for Censorship
(15:25) Book Launch: The Carving of Reality, Best of LessWrong vol. III
(15:56) The U.S. is becoming less stable
(16:32) A Proof of Löbs Theorem using Computability Theory
(17:07) AI Forecasting: Two Years In
(17:43) “Dirty concepts” in AI alignment discourses, and some guesses for how to deal with them
(18:29) Steven Wolfram on AI Alignment
(19:06) AI #25: Inflection Point
(19:35) State of Generally Available Self-Driving
(20:16) DIY Deliberate Practice
(20:51) Ideas for improving epistemics in AI safety outreach
(21:47) Will AI kill everyone? Heres what the godfathers of AI have to say [RA video]
(22:35) Managing risks of our own work
(23:12) If we had known the atmosphere would ignite
First published:
August 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gXqimkQi2gCKHaKHm/prototype-gpt-powered-ea-lw-weekly-summary
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Theologians have often been very critical about utilitarianism - despite the fact that the first versions of utilitarianism have been developed by Christian thinkers.
Vesa Hautala and I now got the opportunity to write an encyclopedia article on Christian Theology and Utilitarianism for the St Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology (SAET). SAET is a new project – a theological analogue of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This is the first such overview as far as we know. It touches on both historical developments as well as points of overlap and tension. If anyone has criticism to offer of our treatment, we'd happily take it.
First published:
August 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ApMiZpWgD9gjpzicg/new-encyclopedia-entry-on-utilitarianism-and-christian
Linkpost URL:
https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/UtilitarianismandChristianTheology
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
∼250,000 new contraceptive users, ∼20 million new listeners and up to ∼60x cost effectiveness
TL;DR:
In 2021, FEM launched our pilot: a 3-month family planning radio campaign, educating listeners about maternal health and effective contraception. Our ads and shows played up to 860 times in Kano state in northern Nigeria, reaching ~5.6 million. An independent survey showed that in 11 months, contraceptive use increased by ~75% among all women in the state. Since then, we launched a 9-month campaign, aired proofs of concept in three new locations and re-aired in 8 more states, reaching an estimated 20 million new listeners. We were recommended by Giving What We Can and Founders Pledge, who assess our campaigns as ~22 times as effective as cash transfers. We developed new technologies that will allow us to customise health advice to listeners and run a randomised controlled trial. We continue to build organisational capacity to scale across [...]
Outline:
(00:14) TL;DR:
(01:21) Promising results from our pilot (Oct - Dec 2021)
(03:58) New technology to evaluate our impact (Jan -Dec 2022)
(05:40) Launching our first 9 month campaign (May 2022 - Feb 2023)
(06:49) Scaling our work: three new proofs of concept (Oct - Dec 2022)
(08:13) Cost-effectiveness estimates
(09:47) Meet the FEM team
(12:57) Key learnings
(14:47) Our biggest mistakes
(16:00) Our biggest successes
(16:55) What we’re doing now
(18:17) Our plan for the years ahead
(20:30) Support our work
First published:
August 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xd9ZZuPCKAvKpzvdB/empowering-numbers-fem-since-2021
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary
- Impact obsession is a potentially unhelpful way of relating to doing good which we’ve observed among effective altruists, including ourselves. (More)
- What do we mean by impact obsession?
- One can distinguish unhealthy and healthy forms of impact obsession. (More)
- Common characteristics include an overwhelming desire for doing the most good one can do, basing one’s self-worth on one’s own impact, judging it by increasingly demanding standards (“impact treadmill”), overexerting oneself, neglecting or subjugating non-altruistic interests, and anxiety about having no or negative impact. (More)
- Is impact obsession good or bad?
- Many aspects of impact obsession are reasonable and even desirable. (More)
- Others can have detrimental consequences like depression, anxiety, guilt, exhaustion, burnout, and disillusionment. (More)
- What to do about (unhealthy) impact obsession?
- Besides useful standard (mental) health advice, potentially helpful strategies involve, for example: reflecting on our relationship with and motives for having impact, integrating conflicting desires, shifting from avoidance to approach motivation, cultivating additional sources of meaning and self-worth, reducing resistance [...]
Outline:
(05:31) Why we wrote this post
(06:21) What do we mean by impact obsession?
(06:25) Healthy vs. unhealthy impact obsession
(08:25) Common characteristics
(08:56) Overwhelming desire for maximizing positive impact
(09:41) Self-worth and identity are linked to impact
(10:09) Personally demanding (or unreasonable) standards
(10:39) Excessive comparisons and the impact treadmill
(11:50) Pushing oneself too hard and neglecting non-altruistic interests
(12:34) Black-and-white thinking
(13:07) Frequent worries about (prioritization) mistakes
(13:40) Obsessive thoughts about impact
(14:11) Impact obsession, clinical perfectionism, and scrupulosity
(15:57) Benefits and costs
(16:00) Isn’t impact obsession reasonable?
(17:43) Benefits
(18:54) Potential negative consequences of unhealthy impact obsession
(19:11) Depression, feeling worthless or unable to contribute
(21:05) Anxiety and guilt
(22:47) Burnout and (chronic) fatigue
(25:09) Reduced curiosity, excitement, and interests
(27:02) Less likely to enter flow states and reduced creativity
(27:58) Competitive comparisons, shame, and isolation
(29:13) Other risks
(29:51) What might help
(31:11) Reflect on your relationship with having impact and your conflicting motivations
(32:49) Strengthen additional sources of meaning and self-worth
(35:48) What about value drift?
(37:25) Approach motivation vs. avoidance motivation
(38:51) Obligation vs. exciting opportunity
(39:20) Focusing on the positive
(41:09) Focus less on yourself, compare yourself less
(42:11) You want to be the least impactful person in the world
(43:57) Leaning into absurdity
(45:22) Accepting what we cannot change
(46:31) Beware self-improvement perfectionism
(46:57) Welcoming and exploring negative emotions with acceptance and curiosity
(50:48) Fear and coming to terms with the possibility of having no impact
(53:48) Sadness, despair, and guilt
(55:22) Feeling like a failure or inadequate
(58:30) Replacing self-criticism with self-compassion
(01:00:32) Fully commit to rest
(01:00:51) Keeping yourself busy with semi-useful tasks
(01:02:08) Not committing to rest
(01:03:56) It’s fine if you need more rest than others
(01:04:25) Other related relevant resources
(01:04:58) Acknowledgements
The original text contained 29 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sBJLPeYdybSCiGpGh/impact-obsession-feeling-like-you-never-do-enough-good
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Sometimes, there is a reason other grantmakers aren't funding a fairly well-known EA (-adjacent) project.
This post is written in a professional capacity, as a volunteer/sometimes contractor for EA Funds’ Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF), which is a fiscally sponsored project of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) and Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. I am not and have never been an employee at either Effective Ventures entity. Opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent that of any of my employers or of either Effective Ventures entity. I originally wanted to make this post a personal shortform, but Caleb Parikh encouraged me to make it a top-level post instead.
There is an increasing number of new grantmakers popping up, and also some fairly rich donors in longtermist EA that are thinking of playing a more active role in their own giving (instead of deferring). I am broadly excited about the diversification of [...]
Outline:
(02:13) Reasons against broadly sharing reasons for rejection
(03:16) Select examples
(06:52) Some tradeoffs and other considerations
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sWMwGNgpzPn7X9oSk/select-examples-of-adverse-selection-in-longtermist
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I've written several posts about the plausible implications of "evidential cooperation in large worlds" (ECL), on my newly-revived blog. This is a cross-post of the first. If you want to see the rest of the posts, you can either go to the blog or click through the links in this one.
All of the content on my blog, including this post, only represent my own views — not those of my employer. (Currently OpenPhilanthropy.)
“ECL” is short for “evidential cooperation in large worlds”. It’s an idea that was originally introduced in Oesterheld (2017) (under the name of “multiverse-wide superrationality”). This post will explore implications of ECL, but it won’t explain the idea itself. If you haven’t encountered it before, you can read the paper linked above or this summary written by Lukas Gloor.1
This post lists all candidates for decision-relevant implications of ECL that I know about and think are plausibly important.2 In [...]
Outline:
(01:59) Summary (with links to sub-sections)
(04:27) Affect whether (and how) future actors do ECL
(04:32) Futures with aligned AI
(06:24) Futures with misaligned AI
(07:53) How us doing ECL affects our priorities
(07:58) Care more about other humans’ universe-wide values
(08:03) It matters less which universe-wide values control future resources (seems minor in practice?)
(11:51) Upside- and downside-focused longtermists should care more about each others’ values
(16:09) Care more about evolved aliens’ universe-wide values
(16:21) Minor: Prioritize non-AI extinction risk less highly
(19:37) Influence how AI benefits/harms alien civilizations’ values
(20:25) Possibly: Weigh suffering-focused values somewhat higher if they are more universal
(23:55) Care more about misaligned AIs’ universe-wide values
(24:53) Minor: Prioritize AI takeover risk less highly
(26:24) Positively influence misaligned AI
(26:55) More
(27:18) Appendices
(27:22) What values do you need for this to be relevant?
(28:33) More details on the split between humans, evolved species, and misaligned AI
(29:10) Why distinguish humans from aliens?
(30:49) Why distinguish evolved aliens from misaligned AIs?
(32:06) Acknowledgments
(32:29) Footnotes
First published:
August 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WYsLjeJzh7tZqe6Lo/implications-of-evidential-cooperation-in-large-worlds
Linkpost URL:
https://lukasfinnveden.substack.com/p/implications-of-ecl
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Executive summary
This article addresses biosafety and biosecurity in high-containment level laboratories (BSL-3 and BSL-4) in Latin America, with a focus on classification, current status, and regulatory frameworks. In the region, the lack of uniformity in data collection makes it difficult to accurately understand the infrastructure of high-containment laboratories. Regulatory frameworks vary across the region and present challenges in terms of standardization. Although countries like Colombia have made progress in this area, there is a need to establish updated and centralized regulatory frameworks in each country.
To improve biosafety and biosecurity, we make a series of recommendations such as the implementation of biological risk management systems in laboratories, the promotion of non-punitive incident reports, the standardization of supervision processes, collaboration between institutions, and the exchange of best practices.
Introduction
Biosafety and biosecurity in high-containment level laboratories (BSL-3 and BSL-4) are of vital importance for the protection of public health. These laboratories work with dangerous [...]
Outline:
(00:12) Executive summary
(02:04) Classification of laboratories by biosafety levels
(05:42) Current state
(12:44) Brazil
(26:55) Conclusion
First published:
August 22nd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QNdG4msZS3G29uG5X/biosafety-in-bsl-3-bsl-3-and-bsl-4-laboratories-mapping-and
Linkpost URL:
https://riesgoscatastroficosglobales.com/articulos/sorg5wjp1jfpvp0bkucw6yol1tc618
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Full report (in PDF) available on the Rethink Priorities website. This is a follow-up to our report "Strategic considerations for upcoming EU farmed animal legislation".
Summary
- The majority of fish consumed (in tonnes) in the EU are either wild-caught fish or farmed fish imported from non-EU Norway, Scotland, and Turkey. I don't see evidence that the EU will regulate imports of fish this decade and I'm less confident on interventions that affect wild animal welfare. So we narrowed the scope of the report to the species of fish farmed in the largest numbers of individuals and life-years in the EU: sea bass, sea bream, and small trout.
- The report argues that the most promising EU fish policy ask right now is a fast transition to better slaughter conditions of sea bass, sea bream, and (small) rainbow trout. It's an option that EU policymakers already put on the table as part of their [...]
Outline:
(04:26) Acknowledgments
First published:
August 22nd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qGv4JhL5wcYgA7zj8/eu-farmed-fish-policy-reform-roadmap
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Imagine this: • > Oliver: … Thus we see that donating to the opera is the best way of promoting the arts.> > Eleanor: Okay, but I’m principally int… ---
First published:
January 24th, 2016
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/omoZDu8ScNbot6kXS/beware-surprising-and-suspicious-convergence
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary:
This is the story of my EA journey. Sharing it as I believe that my story could be relevant to others particularly those who arrive in EA mid-career or not having worked on a cause area before.
Background:
Around two years ago a podcast appeared on my spotify playlist. It was one of the 80,000 hours episodes. It piqued my curiosity and after listening to it I wanted to learn more. Listening to some other episodes I realized there are a lot of concepts I don't understand so that drove me to look for more resources online. Up until that point I have not come across EA. I had a broad interest in global health & development, philanthropy and doing good but no practical insight how to go about this. I started reading about EA online, then signed up for the virtual intro fellowship. Within a couple of months I read a [...]
First published:
August 20th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g4TcehspjDumGXucx/my-ea-journey
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a linkpost for https://usedagger.com/
Dagger (usedagger.com) is a new tool for calculations with uncertainty. It uses Monte Carlo simulation.
There are two ways to specify your simulation model:
- Import an existing spreadsheet
- use Probly, a Python dialect designed for probabilistic simulation
ℹ️ Each of the two links above has 4 interactive examples. You might want to start there.
Spreadsheet
Example
In this 15-second video, we take a complex existing spreadsheet (100+ rows) from GiveWell and turn it into a Monte Carlo simulation
The sheet already gives us "optimistic/pessimistic" values, so it's as simple as adding one column to specify the distribution as (e.g.) uniform
(Longer version of this video)
Features
Dependency graph
Intuitive and mathematically rigorous sensitivity analysis
Our sensitivity analysis uses Sobol’ global sensitivity indices. The approach and the intuition behind it are explained in more detail here.
ℹ️ You need to enable the sensitivity analysis under "Advanced options"
Summary table
This table exposes the structure of your model by showing the dependency graph [...]
Outline:
(00:38) Spreadsheet
(00:41) Example
(01:08) Features
(01:11) Dependency graph
(01:17) Intuitive and mathematically rigorous sensitivity analysis
(02:00) Probly
(02:11) Example
(02:25) Distribution support
(03:00) Limitations
First published:
August 19th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/StbTBXTrur3ntur4u/new-probabilistic-simulation-tool
Linkpost URL:
https://usedagger.com/
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
NB: This post should arguably have a minor content warning (for lack of a better term) for anyone in the community who might be particularly vulnerable to thinking about their career in a way which would induce strong anxiety. Perhaps consider reading this first: You have more than one goal, and that's fine — EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org). This piece is about the importance of having non-impact focussed goals, and that it is extremely ok to have them. My post is intended to suggest what people should do in so far as they want to have more impact, rather than being a suggestion of what everyone in the EA community should do.
Your decisions matter. The precise career path you pick really matters for your impact. I think many people in the EA community would say they believe this if asked, but haven’t really internalised what this means for them. I [...]
Outline:
(01:49) Key Claims
(02:54) Defining prioritisation in terms of your career
(03:50) For any given person, the best “EA” career paths are 10x better than the median EA career paths:
(04:58) Why might this be the case?
(06:57) Why we should model these factors as multipliers and not a sum
(07:31) Looking for large multipliers
(09:37) Multipliers that are close to 0
(10:29) Why thinking about prioritisation can help you reach the best career paths for you
(10:35) By default, you should expect thinking about prioritisation-relevant decisions to improve them.
(11:26) Good decision-making compounds
(12:16) Having clear models helps you make useful updates
(12:43) Thinking about prioritisation allows you to be more entrepreneurial
(13:23) Other useful effects:
(13:35) Improving your epistemics
(14:04) Improving community epistemics
(15:32) Providing motivation
(15:51) What does thinking seriously about prioritisation look like?
(17:59) A more concrete suggestion:
(22:59) Incorporating personal fit:
(23:31) There’s normally multiple bottlenecks for any given issue, they aren’t always obvious, and so don’t associate personal fit with an entire problem area.
(24:52) People underrate the difference in importance of problems compared to the cost of transitioning fields
(26:11) When to stop thinking about prioritisation?
(27:31) Advice on forming your own views on key uncertainties
(27:44) It is ok to start with not knowing much, even if you think you are “supposed” to have thought more about things. Prioritisation is hard.
(28:40) Make your own thinking very explicit
(29:04) Seriously go and talk to people
(29:27) Follow what is actually important/exciting for you
(29:58) Buy, not browse (usually)
(30:44) Mistakes to avoid when thinking about prioritisation
(30:49) Anchoring too much on what opportunities you have in the short-term
(31:45) Trying to form an inside view on everything
(32:28) Naive optimisation
(33:14) Being paralysed by uncertainty
(34:00) Useful resources for prioritisation:
(35:52) Why I might be wrong:
(36:29) Building your own models is so hard that you can’t improve your expected accuracy by very much at all
(37:28) There is a significant degree of convergence between different career paths in expectation
(37:44) Causes don’t actually vary very much (within 1 order of magnitude) in actual importance
(38:02) Non-transferable, field-specific skills/career capital, which have good continual returns to improvement, are the dominant effect on performance in important EA cause areas
(38:36) Why you might want to act as if my claims are true, even if you have significant doubts:
(39:15) Acknowledgements:
(39:49) Appendix: What made me think 50% of self identifying EAs don’t take prioritisation seriously enough in their pursuit of impact.
First published:
August 18th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/to34jb5LuWo4fM9gC/taking-prioritisation-within-ea-seriously
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Disclaimer: I (Jessica) opted to post this without extra nuance as opposed to not sharing. Hopefully, it can still help spark some discussion and consideration but there are many additional considerations here.
Ben West made this rough Squiggle model you can use to calculate an organization's costs of replacing an employee in months of productivity and rough monetary value.
The model is pretty simple: total_cost = hiring_manager_time + hiring_support_time + time_without_employee + skill_up_time
I wanted this to be shared because when Ben mentioned some of the extra costs of an employee leaving an org, I was surprised by how high it was. I think others might be underweighting this cost as well which could influence some career decisions[1].
One highlighted point from the model I wasn’t seriously considering:
A new employee will generally take some amount of time to become as efficient as
the previous employee.
This comes from several sources:
- New people will often [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 16th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xrQkYh8GGR8GipKHL/how-expensive-is-leaving-your-org-squiggle-model
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Also available on the Rethink Priorities website.
Executive summary
Plant-based meats, like the Beyond Sausage or Impossible Burger, and cultivated meats have become a source of optimism for reducing animal-based meat usage.
- Public health, environmental, and animal welfare advocates aim to mitigate the myriad harms of meat usage.
- The price, taste, and convenience (PTC) hypothesis posits that if plant-based meat is competitive with animal-based meat on these three criteria, the large majority of current consumers would replace animal-based meat with plant-based meat.
- The PTC hypothesis rests on the premise that PTC primarily drive food choice.
The PTC hypothesis and premise are both likely false.
- A majority of current consumers would continue eating primarily animal-based meat even if plant-based meats were PTC-competitive.
- PTC do not mainly determine food choices of current consumers; social and psychological factors also play important roles.
- Although not examined here, there may exist other viable approaches to drive the replacement of animal-based meats with plant-based meats.
There [...]
Outline:
(00:11) Executive summary
(02:01) Introduction
(07:26) The PTC premise
(13:55) Operationalizing and testing PTC individually
(14:43) Price
(18:13) Taste
(24:35) Convenience
(27:03) Empirical tests of the PTC hypothesis
(28:43) Hypothetical discrete choice experiments
(34:29) Commercial case studies
(37:40) Malan 2022 field experiment
(47:21) Further caveats
(52:09) Conclusions and recommendations
(56:55) Disclosures
(56:58) Author information
(57:05) Acknowledgements
(57:27) Funding
(57:42) Conflicts of interest
(57:55) Open science
(58:02) References
The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 15th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iukeBPYNhKcddfFki/price-taste-and-convenience-competitive-plant-based-meat
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Someone asked me a question after my talk on climate change and emerging fungal pathogens. The question was, why should we give attention to fungi when we know the risk of bioengineering it can be low. Hence the weight given to viruses and bacteria. I thought through and wondered that it is interesting and the EA community should understand why this should be considered. I think in my opinion we need to take fungi very seriously for so many reasons:
What we know that makes fungi pathogen interesting:
- There are only three known anitifungal drugs against major fungi pathogens which are not very effective. The available antifungals have narrow spectrus and high toxicity, and because of the plasticity of the fungi genome resistance is developed very easily. The seriousness of this issue was brought to fore during the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of secondary infections due to fungi pathogens were reported . [...]
Outline:
(02:04) Why is Candida auris a problem? source
First published:
August 18th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/azezpsWKkcPJd2Hfy/why-we-should-fear-any-bioengineered-fungus-and-give-fungi
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Negotiations and pressure campaigns have proven effective at driving corporate change across industries and movements. I expect that AI safety/governance can learn from this!
The basic idea:
- The runaway success of effective animal advocacy has been sweeping corporate reform
- Similar tactics have been successful across social movements
- GovAI to ??? to PauseAI: Corporate campaigns need an ecosystem of roles and tactics
Possible next steps
- Pragmatic research: ask prioritisation, user interviews, and message testing
- Start learning by doing
- Work extensively with volunteers (and treat them like staff members)
- Moral trade: longtermist money for experienced campaigner secondments
The runaway success of effective animal advocacy has been sweeping corporate reform
Animal advocates, funded especially by Open Philanthropy and other EA sources, have achieved startling success in driving corporate change over the past ~decade. As Lewis Bollard, Senior Program Officer at Open Philanthropy, writes:
A decade ago, most of the world’s largest food corporations lacked even a basic farm animal welfare policy. Today, they almost all [...]
Outline:
(00:58) The runaway success of effective animal advocacy has been sweeping corporate reform
(03:21) Similar tactics have been successful across social movements
(04:14) GovAI to ??? to PauseAI: Corporate campaigns need an ecosystem of roles and tactics
(07:10) Caveats and concerns
(07:54) Possible next steps
(08:04) Pragmatic research: ask prioritisation and message testing
(08:56) Start learning by doing
(11:05) Work extensively with volunteers (and treat them like staff members?)
(11:47) Moral trade: longtermist money for experienced campaigner secondments
The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 17th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zjmpFW3nBKwaBB5xr/corporate-campaigns-work-a-key-learning-for-ai-safety
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Disclaimer: This post is entirely based on my impressions of longtermism as informed by my interaction with the literature, other longtermists, and questions from curious non-longtermists. This post is not a critique of the work being done by longtermists currently but rather a push to widen the category of interventions being pursued under the longtermist umbrella. It may be that I am missing some key facts in which case I would greatly appreciate responses challenging my assumptions, claims, and conclusions. Finally, all views expressed here are solely mine and do not reflect any organizations I am affiliated with directly or indirectly. I take full responsibility for any harmful premises presented.
[Summary]
This post is a personal reflection on longtermism from my perspective as an African woman living and working in the continent. In the post, I make the claim that it seems as though pursuing the ‘flourishing of future generations’ such [...]
Outline:
(00:45) [Summary]
(01:30) [Earlier impressions]
(04:11) [On the language of longtermism]
(05:00) [Formal v Substantive Equality]
(07:05) [My claim]
(11:18) [Closing remarks]
First published:
August 17th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2rRsjdrL9BEWC3d7C/personal-reflections-on-longtermism
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Authors: Ashura Batungwanayo (University of KwaZulu Natal) and Hayley Martin (University of Cape Town)
DISCLAIMER: This paper draws from our collective experiences, perspectives, and conversations with community builders in Africa who share similar experiences and perspectives.
Introduction
In our engagement with Effective Altruism (EA), we noted a distinct emphasis on Existential Risks, notably concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI), alongside a focus on animal welfare and veganism—issues that carry nuanced significance, differing between Western societies and Africa due to diverse factors in animal husbandry. However, our initial allure lay in EA's focus on Global Health and Development (GH&D). GH&D holds a special significance for us as it directly confronts the realities we, as African students, encounter daily.
Amidst this, the need for balance arises: acknowledging existential risks while prioritising urgent issues like poverty and education. Our vision extends to an EA Africa initiative that blends bottom-up and top-down approaches for effective, contextually attuned change. However [...]
Outline:
(00:25) Introduction
(05:46) Empowering African Self-Sufficiency
(08:37) Conclusion
First published:
August 17th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9cdntNDJQTS8dH5fh/making-ea-more-inclusive-representative-and-impactful-in
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TLDR: In this post, we announce additional top charity interventions we want to start through our upcoming February-March 2024 Incubation Program. Applications are now open!
We’ve added two new exciting ideas to the pool of interventions we want to see started through our February 5 - March 31, 2024 Incubation Program. This increases the number of interventions to 6, and we’re really hoping you help us get them founded (by applying or sharing the information with friends and colleagues who they might be a good fit for).
We’re now seeking founders for:
1) An organization focused on bringing new, counterfactual funding into the animal advocacy movement.
2) An organization providing teacher guides and other aspects of structured pedagogy to improve education outcomes in low-income countries.
Before we go into the detailed descriptions, here is a reminder of the previously announced top ideas for this program:
3) Childhood vaccination reminders
4) Mass media to [...]
Outline:
(02:24) One-Sentence Summaries
(02:28) Fundraising for animal advocacy
(02:38) Structured Pedagogy
(02:52) Fundraising for animal issues
(03:36) Structured pedagogy
(04:12) Fundraising for animal issues
(07:40) Structured pedagogy
(11:11) How to apply
First published:
August 17th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hpbaNabCDCfnhzc2P/ce-alert-2-new-interventions-for-february-march-2024
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
What is the definition of Effective Altruism? What claims does it make? What do you have to believe or do, to be an Effective Altruist?
I don’t think that any of these questions make sense.
It’s not surprising that we ask them: if you asked those questions about feminism or secularism, Islamism or libertarianism, the answers you would get would be relevant and illuminating. Different proponents of the same movement might give you slightly different answers, but synthesising the answers of several people would give you a pretty good feeling for the core of the movement.
But each of these movements is answering a question. Should men and women be equal? (Yes.) What role should the church play in governance? (None.) What kind of government should we have? (One based on Islamic law.) How big a role should government play in people’s private lives? (A small one.)
Effective Altruism isn’t [...]
Outline:
(01:35) What does this mean for how we think and talk about Effective Altruism?
First published:
October 16th, 2014
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FpjQMYQmS3rWewZ83/effective-altruism-is-a-question-not-an-ideology
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This paper was originally published as a working paper in May 2022 and is forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy.
Abstract
How should we weigh suffering against happiness? This paper highlights the existence of an argument from intuitively plausible axiological principles to the striking conclusion that in comparing different populations, there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being. In addition to a number of structural principles, the argument relies on two key premises. The first is the contrary of the so-called Reverse Repugnant Conclusion. The second is a principle according to which the addition of any population of lives with positive welfare levels makes the outcome worse if accompanied by sufficiently many lives that are not worth living. I consider whether we should accept the conclusion of the argument and what we may end up committed to if we do not, illustrating the implications [...]
Outline:
(00:12) Abstract
(01:07) Introduction
(04:00) Read the rest of the paper
First published:
August 17th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bNJwJS8eAJBJABPXd/the-weight-of-suffering-andreas-mogensen
Linkpost URL:
https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/the-weight-of-suffering-andreas-mogensen-global-priorities-institute-university-of-oxford/
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a blog post, not a research report, meaning it was produced quickly and is not to Rethink Priorities’ typical standards of substantiveness and careful checking for accuracy.Super quick summaryThis is a list of twenty projects that we (Rethink Priorities’ Existential Security Team) think might be especially promising projects for reducing existential risk, based on our very preliminary and high-level research to identify and compare projects.You can see an overview of the full list here. Here are five ideas we (tentatively) think seem especially promising:Improving info/cybersec at top AI labsAI lab coordinationField building for AI policyFacilitating people’s transition from AI capabilities research to AI safety researchFinding market opportunities for biodefence-relevant technologiesIntroductionWhat is this list?This is a list of projects that we (the Existential Security Team at Rethink Priorities) think are plausible candidates for being top projects for substantially reducing existential risk.The list was generated based on a wide search (resulting in an initial list of around 300 ideas, most of which we did not come up with ourselves[1]) and a shallow, high-level prioritization process (spending between a few minutes and an hour per idea). The process took about 100 total hours of work, spread across three researchers. More details on our research process can be found in the appendix. Note that some of the ideas we considered most promising were excluded from this list due to being confidential, sensitive or particularly high-risk.We’re planning to prioritize projects on this list (as well as other non-public ideas) for further research, as candidates for projects we might eventually incubate. We’re planning to focus exclusively on projects aiming to reduce AI existential risk in 2023 but have included project ideas in other cause areas on this list as we still think those ideas are promising and would be excited about others working on them. More on our team’s strategy here.We’d be potentially excited about others researching, pursuing and supporting the projects on this list, although we don't think this is a be-all-end-all list of promising existential-risk-reducing projects and there are important limitations to this list (see “Key limitations of this list”).Why are we sharing this list and who is it for?By sharing this list, we’re hoping to:Give a sense of what kinds of projects we’re considering incubating and be transparent about our research process and results.Provide inspiration for projects others could consider working on.Contribute to community discussion about existential security entrepreneurship – we’re excited to receive feedback on the list, additional project suggestions, and information about the project areas we highlight (for example, existing projects we may have missed, top ideas not on this list, or reasons that some of our ideas may be worse than we think).You might be interested in looking at this list if you’re:Considering being a founder or early employee of a new project. This list can give you some inspiration for potential project areas to look into. If you’re interested in being a (co-)founder or early employee for one of the projects on this list, feel free to reach out to Marie Buhl [...] ---
First published:
June 21st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AJwuMw7ddcKQNFLcR/20-concrete-projects-for-reducing-existential-risk
Linkpost URL:
https://rethinkpriorities.org/longtermism-research-notes/concrete-projects-for-reducing-existential-risk
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Author John Green talks about a 16-year-old tuberculosis patient in Sierra Leone.
For me this was a good reminder of how unfair it is that where you're born has such a huge effect on how likely you are to suffer from a disease like TB. It's also a vivid account of what it really means to save a life.
First published:
August 16th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SCYrASfriLCoFaqCZ/henry-john-green-video
Linkpost URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhVJMO0wgTE
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We’ve recently published on our website a summary of our research paper on catastrophic risks from AI, which we are cross-posting here. We hope that this summary helps to make our research more accessible and to share our policy recommendations in a more convenient format.
Executive summary
Catastrophic AI risks can be grouped under four key categories which we explore below, and in greater depth in CAIS’ linked paper:
- Malicious use: People could intentionally harness powerful AIs to cause widespread harm. AI could be used to engineer new pandemics or for propaganda, censorship, and surveillance, or released to autonomously pursue harmful goals. To reduce these risks, we suggest improving biosecurity, restricting access to dangerous AI models, and holding AI developers liable for harms.
- AI race: Competition could push nations and corporations to rush AI development, relinquishing control to these systems. Conflicts could spiral out of control with autonomous weapons and AI-enabled cyberwarfare. Corporations will [...]
Outline:
(00:22) Executive summary
(02:40) 1. Introduction
(04:00) 2. Malicious Use
(04:14) Bioterrorism
(06:18) Unleashing AI Agents
(07:04) Persuasive AIs
(07:51) Concentration of Power
(08:27) Suggestions
(09:51) 3. AI Race
(10:12) Military AI Arms Race
(12:34) Corporate AI Arms Race
(13:52) Evolutionary Dynamics
(14:56) Suggestions
(16:17) 4. Organizational Risks
(17:22) Accidents Are Hard to Avoid
(18:41) Organizational Factors Can Mitigate Catastrophe
(20:18) Suggestions
(22:31) 5. Rogue AIs
(23:00) Proxy Gaming
(23:58) Goal Drift
(24:47) Power-Seeking
(25:33) Deception
(26:38) Suggestions
(27:45) 6. Conclusion
First published:
August 15th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6WvnfKvF2i6mqp3za/an-overview-of-catastrophic-ai-risks
Linkpost URL:
https://www.safe.ai/ai-risk
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We just published an interview: Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment. You can click through for the audio, a full transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
There’s no money to invest in education elsewhere, so they almost get trapped in the cycle where they don’t get a lot from crop production, but everyone in the family has to work there to just stay afloat. Basically, you get locked in. There’s almost no opportunities externally to go elsewhere.
So one of my core arguments is that if you’re going to address global poverty, you have to increase agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. There’s almost no way of avoiding that.
- Hannah Ritchie
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews the head of research at Our World in Data — Hannah Ritchie — on the case for environmental optimism.
They cover:
- Why agricultural [...]
Outline:
(00:22) Episode summary
(02:16) Highlights
(02:19) Why agricultural productivity is so low in sub-Saharan Africa
(05:47) The sustainability equation
(09:48) How buying environmentally friendly technology in helps low-income countries
(14:20) 4 ways to change our food system to solve several environmental issues at once
(15:58) Policy change doesnt have to be slow
First published:
August 15th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KT2Cc3fY3WfhLFRj4/why-it-makes-sense-to-be-optimistic-about-the-environment
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary
- Previous research from Rethink Priorities found that a majority of the population (59%) agreed with a statement from the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) that stated “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” 26% of the population disagreed with this statement. This research piece does further qualitative research to analyze this opposition in more depth.
- The most commonly mentioned theme among those who disagreed with the CAIS statement was that other priorities were more important (mentioned by 36% of disagreeing respondents), with climate change particularly commonly mentioned.
- This theme was particularly strongly occurring among younger disagreeing respondents (43.3%) relative to older disagreeing respondents (27.8%).
- The next most commonly mentioned theme was rejection of the idea that AI would cause extinction (23.4%), though some of these respondents agreed AI may pose other risks.
- Another commonly mentioned theme was the idea that [...]
Outline:
(00:05) Summary
(01:43) Introduction
(02:47) Common themes
(04:37) Other priorities
(09:55) Not extinction
(11:34) Not yet
(14:22) Control
(16:48) Benefits
(20:21) Not capable / Not physical
(22:26) Sci fi
(23:21) Responses from those who did not disagree
(23:58) Demographic differences
(25:07) Limitations and future research
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 15th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RYNtykh5xM467zRNj/why-some-people-disagree-with-the-cais-statement-on-ai
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I. Introduction
Longtermism is the notion that those who will live in the long-term future matter just as much, morally, as those beings that are alive today; that, although current conceptions of who society ought to care about appears restricted to living people, this understanding must change because there is, on society at large, a moral obligation to care, and to ensure that future people are able to live their lives satisfactorily.[1] MacAskill coined the term Longtermism in 2017, in a bid to help concretize the idea of caring about future people into one word that helped make it sound like a consequential movement.[2]
This, however, is not to say that the ideas that longtermism espouses are particularly brand new. To the contrary, it has been admitted that longtermism builds on a rather long historical concern for future people.[3]
A perception that may be gleaned is that longtermism is a ‘Western’ idea, so [...]
First published:
August 15th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2sgSwwTe4mG4uP36e/unveiling-the-longtermism-framework-in-islam-urging-muslims
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I work at 80,000 Hours but this is not an 80,000 Hours thing – this is just an idea I wrote up because I had it and thought it was kind of cool.
I probably won't be executing on it myself, but I thought I'd throw it out there into the world in case someone is interested in picking it up and running with it, do-ocracy style![1]
Epistemic status: half baked.
The problem:
Being and staying prepared to switch jobs/careers if an excellent impact opportunity arises is very hard, but high expected value for many people.
The proposal:
Someone set up a "pivot pledge" to provide accountability, support, and encouragement to people who want to be prepared to switch careers in this way.
More on the problem:
In "Jobs to help with the most important century", Holden Karnofsky wrote that if you aren't up for making a career change right now, one thing you can do is [...]
Outline:
(00:25) The problem:
(00:37) The proposal:
(00:48) More on the problem:
(04:38) More on the proposal:
(06:08) Some downsides
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 15th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wxWrHf387RybbztYT/half-baked-idea-a-pivot-pledge
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We’re featuring some opportunities and job listings at the top of this post. Some have (very) pressing deadlines.
You can see previous updates on the "EA Organization Updates (monthly series)" topic page, or in our repository of past newsletters. Notice that there’s also an “org update” tag, where you can find more news and updates that are not part of this consolidated series.
These monthly posts originated as the "Updates" section of the EA Newsletter. Organizations submit their own updates, which we edit for clarity.
(If you think your organization should be getting emails about adding their updates to this series, please apply here.)
Opportunities and jobs
Opportunities
Consider also checking opportunities listed on the EA Opportunities Board.
Applications are open for a number of conferences
- EA Global: Boston (27-29 October) is for people who have a solid understanding of effective altruism, and who are taking significant actions on the basis of key ideas [...]
Outline:
(00:45) Opportunities and jobs
(00:48) Opportunities
(02:47) Job listings
(04:29) Organization Updates
(04:32) 80,000 Hours
(05:19) Anima International
(05:55) Animal Charity Evaluators
(06:05) Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI)
(06:28) Centre for Effective Altruism
(06:44) Charity Entrepreneurship
(08:26) Family Empowerment Media
(08:42) Faunalytics
(09:32) Fish Welfare Initiative
(10:26) Founders Pledge
(11:18) GiveWell
(12:31) Giving What We Can
(12:55) Global Catastrophic Risk Institute
(13:17) The Humane League
(13:55) New Incentives
(14:25) Open Philanthropy
(15:05) Rethink Priorities (RP)
First published:
August 14th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jS6HPv4Qx9gWC98f5/ea-organization-updates-august-2023
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Forecasting Festival hosted by Manifold
TL;DR: Manifold is hosting a conference! 🥳 Chat with the Manifold team, special guests like Robin Hanson, Shayne Coplan, Patrick McKenzie, Dylan Matthews, Destiny, Aella, and more at our inaugural in-person gathering of the forecasting & prediction market community.
More info & buy tickets: manifestconference.net
WHEN: Sept 22-24
WHERE: Berkeley, CA
WHO: Everyone in the forecasting, EA, and LW communities. If you're reading this, you're invited!
Join the Discord here :)
Why should I come?
Forecasting and prediction markets are effective ways of improving our judgement and decision-making — most people in the Effective Altruism and LessWrong communities will feel right at home at Manifest.
Here are extra reasons to come:
- you think forecasting & prediction markets are impactful/fun/cool/rational/intriguing/etc
- you want to vibe with other forecasting nerds
- you want to engage & network with the forecasting community (find jobs/recruit hires/see what’s out there)
- you want to meet & chat with the Manifold team and our special guests (including [...]
Outline:
(00:06) Forecasting Festival hosted by Manifold
(00:51) Why should I come?
(01:43) A day at Manifest
(02:53) Who else is coming?
(03:55) Where can I buy tickets?
First published:
August 14th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uv88CMAmbRtzjcKb2/announcing-manifest-2023-sep-22-24-in-berkeley-3
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I haven't seen this anywhere on the Forum, and I've been curious to see what Holden and Open Phil do.
Alexander Berger is now the sole CEO of Open Phil, while Holden is the 'Director of AI Strategy' and Emily Oehlsen is the Managing Director of Open Phil.
First published:
August 14th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Tnw3juizvcS9E6HXf/linkpost-alexander-berger-is-now-the-sole-ceo-of-open
Linkpost URL:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/alexander-berger-is-now-sole-ceo-of-open-philanthropy/
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Mediators help individuals and organizations resolve conflict. They serve as a buffer when strong emotions come up, help the conflict parties clarify their wants (which are often enough more compatible than it seems at first sight), and help make clear agreements.
Over the years, I've heard of conflicts within a variety of EA organizations. Professional mediation might have helped resolve many of them earlier and more smoothly.
I already bring a solid background in facilitation and counseling and my next career step is open. Accordingly, I'm currently thinking of training up to become a mediator for the EA/rationalist ecosystem. Services I'd include in that role would be:
- Offering conflict mediation for individuals and organizations.
- Giving workshops for EAs on how to disagree better.
- Offering communication trainings for organizations that help transform friction into clarity and cooperation. (I'm already working on trainings for this with the team behind AuthRev and the Relating Languages.)
Do you think this [...]
Outline:
(01:22) Reasons for
(02:25) Reasons against
First published:
August 14th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sKxRKDsBjSNm8JTJD/should-i-train-to-become-a-mediator-for-the-ea-ecosystem
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This essay is a personal history of the $60+ million I allocated to metascience starting in 2012 while working for the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures). It's long (22k+ words with 250+ links), so keep reading if you want to know:
- How the Center for Open Science started
- How I accidentally up working with the John Oliver show
- What kept PubPeer from going under in 2014
- How a new set of data standards in neuroimaging arose
- How a future-Nobel economist got started with a new education research organization
- How the most widely-adopted set of journal standards came about
- Why so many journals are offering registered reports
- How writing about ideas on Twitter could fortuitously lead to a multi-million grant
- Why we should reform graduate education in quantitative disciplines so as to include published replications
- When meetings are useful (or not)
- Why we need a new federal data infrastructure
The essay is dense with ideas and commentary throughout—not just on the history of [...]
First published:
August 14th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zyrfPkX6apFoDCQsh/metascience-since-2012-a-personal-history
Linkpost URL:
https://goodscience.substack.com/p/metascience-since-2012-a-personal
Want more? Check out our ML Safety Newsletter for technical safety research.
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This is a crosspost for Nuclear Winter by Bean from Naval Gazing. It argues Toon 2008 has overestimated the soot ejected into the stratosphere following a nuclear war by something like a factor of 191[1] (= 1.522(1 + 2)/2(2 + 3)/2*(4 + 13)/2). I have not investigated the claims made in Bean's post, but that seems worthwhile. If its conclusions hold, the soot ejected into the stratosphere following the 4.4 k nuclear detonations analysed in Toon 2008 would be 0.942 Tg[2] (= 180/191) instead of "180 Tg". From Fig. 3a of Toon 2014, the lower soot ejection would lead to a reduction in temperature of 0.2 ºC, and in precipitation of 0.6 %. These would have a negligible impact in terms of food security, and imply the deaths from the climatic effects being dwarfed by the "770 million [direct] casualties" mentioned in Toon 2008.
For context, Luísa Rodriguez estimated "30 Tg" of soot [...]
Outline:
(02:57) Nuclear Winter
(17:24) Acknowledgements
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 13th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ysq53coRwgSWHHz2x/nuclear-winter-scepticism
Linkpost URL:
https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter
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I'm not very good at feeling the size of large numbers. Once you start tossing around numbers larger than 1,000 (or maybe even 100), the numbers just seem "big".
Consider Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. If you told me that Sirius is as big as a million Earths, I would feel like that's a lot of Earths. If, instead, you told me that you could fit a billion Earths inside Sirius … I would still just feel like that's a lot of Earths.
The feelings are almost identical. In context, my brain grudgingly admits that a billion is a lot larger than a million, and puts forth a token effort to feel like a one-billion-Earths-sized star is bigger than a one-million-Earths-sized star. But out of context — if I weren’t anchored at "a million" when [...]
First published:
October 7th, 2014
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hkimyETEo76hJ6NpW/on-caring
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Hi all, a quick announcement that Utilitarianism.net now has AI-narrated audio (courtesy of the good folks at Type III Audio)! Click the audio icon on almost any page of the website, or subscribe to the podcast to listen to it all in your preferred podcast app.
Enjoy!
First published:
August 9th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SK4PdjbBJHtCc97SA/utilitarianism-net-audio
Linkpost URL:
https://feeds.type3.audio/utilitarianism-net.rss
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Prompted by the FTX collapse, the rapid progress in AI, and increased mainstream acceptance of AI risk concerns, there has recently been a fair amount of discussion among EAs whether it would make sense to rebalance the movement’s portfolio of outreach/recruitment/movement-building activities away from efforts that use EA/EA-related framings and towards projects that instead focus on the constituent causes. In March 2023, Open Philanthropy’s Alexander Berger invited Claire Zabel (Open Phil), James Snowden (Open Phil), Max Dalton (CEA), Nicole Ross (CEA), Niel Bowerman (80k), Will MacAskill (GPI), and myself (Open Phil, staffing the group) to join a working group on this and related questions.
In the end, the group only ended up having two meetings, in part because it proved more difficult than expected to surface key action-relevant disagreements. Prior to the first session, participants circulated relevant memos and their initial thoughts on the topic. The group also did a small [...]
First published:
August 10th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3kMQTjtdWqkxGuWxB/update-on-cause-area-focus-working-group
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This is a 6-9 session syllabus on the fundamentals of global priorities research in economics.
The purpose is to help economics students and researchers interested in GPR get a big picture view of the field and come up with research ideas.
Because of this focus on fundamentals, the readings are rather light on economics and heavy on philosophy and empirics of different cause areas.
Previous versions of this list were used internally at GPI and during GPI’s Oxford Global Priorities Fellowship in 2023, where the prompts guided individual reflection and group discussion.
Many thanks to the following for their help creating and improving this syllabus: Gustav Alexandrie, Loren Fryxell, Arden Koehler, Luis Mota, and Charlotte Siegmann. The readings below don't necessarily represent their views, GPI's, or mine.
1. Philosophical Foundations
Topic: Global priorities research is a normative enquiry. It is primarily interested in understanding what we should do in the face of global problems, and only derivatively interested in how those [...]
Outline:
(00:55) 1. Philosophical Foundations
(03:27) 2. Effective altruism: differences in impact and cost-effectiveness estimates
(05:50) 3. Animal Welfare
(07:32) 4. Longtermism and Existential Risk Reduction
(09:41) 5. AI risk
(11:39) 6. Economics and AI risk
(12:58) Optional additional sessions
(13:02) Existential risk and economic growth
(15:37) Patient philanthropy
(16:40) Population
(18:08) Alternate Longtermism Session
(18:17) Longtermism, existential risk, and cluelessness
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g9gfXhNhLdJxSFBLW/fundamentals-of-global-priorities-research-in-economics
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This paper was originally published as a working paper in August 2022 and is forthcoming in Analysis.
Abstract
Some believe that the current era is uniquely important with respect to how well the rest of human history goes. Following Parfit, call this the Hinge of History Hypothesis. Recently, MacAskill has argued that our era is actually very unlikely to be especially influential in the way asserted by the Hinge of History Hypothesis. I respond to MacAskill, pointing to important unresolved ambiguities in his proposed definition of what it means for a time to be influential and criticizing the two arguments used to cast doubt on the claim that the current era is a uniquely important moment in human history.
Introduction
Some believe that the current era is a uniquely important moment in human history. We are living, they claim, at a time of unprecedented risk, heralded by the advent of nuclear weapons and other [...]
Outline:
(00:14) Abstract
(00:52) Introduction
(03:13) Read the rest of the paper
First published:
August 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/idp4GEqWp24ocgfes/the-hinge-of-history-hypothesis-reply-to-macaskill-andreas
Linkpost URL:
https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/andreas-mogensen-the-hinge-of-history-hypothesis-reply-to-macaskill/
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Summary
In this article, I'll share my journey of joining an effective altruism (EA) organisation in the middle of my career. I'll talk about the misconceptions I initially held, how I came to understand the fundamental ideas of EA, increased my involvement in the community, and started connecting with more experienced members. I will also share how I became more active through volunteer work and then intentionally worked towards transitioning my career to have more impact.
Introduction
Within the EA community, you will find many young individuals who started engaging with EA ideas during their university years, devoting significant time to podcasts and articles. While the movement has a large youth presence, seasoned professionals are less common. EA-aligned organisations are eager for professionals who embody their core values. However, immersing oneself in these values can be a challenge if you're already occupied with a full-time job and commitments to family and friends.
I was [...]
Outline:
(00:04) Summary
(00:33) Introduction
(01:28) My Misconceptions about EA
(02:59) Core Values of EA
(04:01) Getting more involved
(05:16) Reaching Out
(06:50) Active Participation
(08:19) Career Change
(09:47) Impact and Community
(10:52) Persistence
(11:47) Resources
(12:05) Acknowledgements
First published:
August 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SCKg5N9oHdBDxHvEM/getting-into-an-ea-aligned-organisation-mid-career
Linkpost URL:
https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/post/getting-into-an-ea-aligned-organisation-mid-career
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Animal Policy International is a Charity Entrepreneurship incubated organisation focused on protecting animal welfare in international trade.
We collaborate with policymakers, farmers, and NGOs towards responsible imports that align with standards and expectations in higher-welfare regions, create fairer market conditions for local farmers, and help to promote higher animal welfare standards in low-welfare countries. You can read more about our work and focus regions in our intro post.
We are looking for skilled volunteers primarily in two areas: research and social media. However, if you are interested in contributing in other domains, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Research
To build the evidence base for our ask, we plan to conduct further research into various topics, including countries’ animal welfare legislation, international supply chains, and write reports for public sharing. We are looking for volunteers to analyse our existing research, identify gaps, conduct additional research, and write and design final reports to be presented to key [...]
Outline:
(00:47) Research
(01:20) Social media
(01:48) Qualities we are looking for
(02:10) What’s in it for you
First published:
August 8th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jqsiixtDrs66Ykp5C/skilled-volunteering-opportunity-at-animal-policy
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I'm working writing more, quicker, and not directly for an EA Forum audience. This is a post copied over from my blog.
I wonder what they’re doing today, the kid whose life I saved. Maybe playing with other kids in their village. Maybe seeking shade with his or her siblings, trying to escape the sub-Saharan African heat. Maybe being held by their mother or grandmother, nurtured.
Whatever they’re doing today, some day they’ll grow up, and they’ll live. They’ll have a first kiss, a favorite dance, a hobby that makes them feel free, a role model they look up to, a best friend… all of it. They’ll live. And I think it will be because of what I did today.
. . .
It isn’t thrilling or adventurous, saving a life in the 21st century. I opened my laptop, clicked my way to a bookmarked website, and donated to a standout charity. Someone watching [...]
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 7th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Nvw7dGi4kmuXCDDhH/i-saved-a-kid-s-life-today
Linkpost URL:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/135792543
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Or: “Why EA biosecurity epistemics are whack”
The effective altruism (EA) biosecurity community focuses on reducing the risks associated with global biological catastrophes (GCBRs). This includes preparing for pandemics, improving global surveillance, and developing technologies to mitigate the risks of engineered pathogens. While the work of this community is important, there are significant challenges to developing good epistemics, or practices for acquiring and evaluating knowledge, in this area.
One major challenge is the issue of infohazards. Infohazards are ideas or information that, if widely disseminated, could cause harm. In the context of biosecurity, this could mean that knowledge of specific pathogens or their capabilities could be used to create bioweapons. As a result, members of the EA biosecurity community are often cautious about sharing information, particularly in online forums where it could be easily disseminated. [1]
The issue of infohazards is not straightforward. Even senior biosecurity professionals may have different thresholds for what they [...]
Outline:
(01:57) Challenges for cause and intervention prioritisation
(04:01) Challenges for transparent and trustworthy advocacy
(06:06) What are known best practices?
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
August 5th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3a6QWDhxYTz5dEMag/how-can-we-improve-infohazard-governance-in-ea-biosecurity
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I collected my favorite public pieces of research on AI strategy, governance, and forecasting from 2023 so far.
If you're a researcher, I encourage you to make a quick list of your favorite pieces of research, then think about what makes it good and whether you're aiming at that with your research.
To illustrate things you might notice as a result of this exercise:
I observe that my favorite pieces of research are mostly aimed at some of the most important questions[1]– they mostly identify a very important problem and try to answer it directly.
I observe that for my favorite pieces of research, I mostly would have been very enthusiastic about a proposal to do that research– it's not like I'd have been skeptical about the topic but the research surprised me with how good its results were.[2]
1. Model evaluation for extreme risks (DeepMind, Shevlane et al., May)
Current approaches to building general-purpose AI [...]
Outline:
(00:48) 1. Model evaluation for extreme risks (DeepMind, Shevlane et al., May)
(02:35) 2. Towards best practices in AGI safety and governance: A survey of expert opinion (GovAI, Schuett et al., May)
(04:42) 3. What does it take to catch a Chinchilla? Verifying Rules on Large-Scale Neural Network Training via Compute Monitoring (Shavit, March)
(06:53) 4. Survey on intermediate goals in AI governance (Rethink Priorities, Räuker and Aird, March)
(09:12) 5. Literature Review of Transformative AI Governance (LPP, Maas, forthcoming)
(10:44) 6. “AI Risk Discussions” website: Exploring interviews from 97 AI Researchers (Gates et al., February)
(12:46) 7. What a compute-centric framework says about AI takeoff speeds - draft report (OpenPhil, Davidson, January)
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zzyD8eTbqj7xairmZ/my-favorite-ai-governance-research-this-year-so-far
Linkpost URL:
https://blog.aiimpacts.org/p/my-favorite-ai-governance-research
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I recently resigned as Columbia EA President and have stepped away from the EA community. This post aims to explain my EA experience and some reasons why I am leaving EA. I will discuss poor epistemic norms in university groups, why retreats can be manipulative, and why paying university group organizers may be harmful. Most of my views on university group dynamics are informed by my experience with Columbia EA. My knowledge of other university groups comes from conversations with other organizers from selective US universities, but I don’t claim to have a complete picture of the university group ecosystem.
Disclaimer: I’ve written this piece in a more aggressive tone than I initially intended. I suppose the writing style reflects my feelings of EA disillusionment and betrayal.
My EA Experience
During my freshman year, I heard about a club called Columbia Effective Altruism. Rumor on the street told me it was a cult, [...]
Outline:
(00:51) My EA Experience
(06:18) Epistemic Problems in Undergraduate EA Communities
(08:08) My Best Guess on Why AI Safety Grips Undergraduate Students
(11:22) Caveats
(11:44) How Retreats Can Foster an Epistemically Unhealthy Culture
(12:06) Against Taking Ideas Seriously
(13:16) Why Do People Take Ideas Seriously in Retreats?
(15:09) Other Retreat Issues
(16:16) University Group Organizer Funding
(16:35) Why I Think Paying Organizers May Be Bad
(17:31) Potential Solutions
(18:21) Final Remarks
First published:
August 3rd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/euzDpFvbLqPdwCnXF/university-ea-groups-need-fixing
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I'm stepping down as chair of the Long-Term Future Fund. I'm writing this post partially as a loose set of reflections on my time there, and partially as an overall update on what's going on with the fund, as I think we should generally be transparent with donors and grantees, and my sense is the broader community has fairly little insight into the fund's current operations. I'll start with a brief history of what's happened since I joined the fund, and its impact, and move to a few reflections on ways the fund is working now.
(Also-- you can donate to the Long-Term Future Fund here, and let us know here if you might be interested in becoming a fund manager. (The Long-Term Future Fund is part of EA Funds, which is a fiscally sponsored project of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) (EV UK) and Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. (EV US). [...]
Outline:
(00:56) A brief history of my time on the Long-Term Future Fund
(03:29) The fund’s impact
(05:42) Reflections
(05:45) Problems with scale
(11:22) Transparency
First published:
August 2nd, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9vazTE4nTCEivYSC6/reflections-on-my-time-on-the-long-term-future-fund
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Views expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer SecureBio.
Summary
- Far-UVC has great promise, but a lot of work still needs to be done
- There still are many important open research questions that need to be answered before the technology can become widely adopted
- Right now, a key priority is to grow the research field and improve coordination
- The main reason far-UVC is so promising is that widespread installation could passively suppress future pandemics before we even learn that an outbreak has occurred
- Higher doses mean more rapid inactivation of airborne pathogens but also more risk for harm to skin, eyes, and through indoor air chemistry. Therefore, the important question in safety is, “How high can far-UVC doses go while maintaining a reasonable risk profile?”
- Existing evidence for skin safety within current exposure guidelines seems pretty robust, and I expect that skin safety won't be the bottleneck for far-UVC deployment at [...]---
First published:
July 31st, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z8ZWwm4xeHBAiLZ6d/thoughts-on-far-uvc-after-working-in-the-field-for-8-months
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SummaryCommunity satisfaction remains high, though is slightly lower post-FTX.More recent cohorts report being more satisfied than earlier cohorts.Respondents identifying as a man were, on average, more satisfied than other respondents.We observed no significant differences in satisfaction based on racial identity.Highly engaged respondents were, on average, more satisfied than less engaged respondents.Prioritizing longtermist causes relative to neartermist causes was associated with higher satisfaction with the communityA large majority (84.1%) of respondents report they are likely to still be involved in EA in three years’ time, while only a small minority (5.1%) thought it unlikely they would still be involved.Respondents who identified as a man reported being slightly more likely to remain in the community.We observed no significant differences in retention based on racial identity.More engaged respondents reported being significantly more likely to remain in EA.Higher endorsement of longtermist causes was associated with being more likely to remain in EA, while higher endorsement of neartermist causes was associated with being less likely to remain in EA.More respondents reported that their experiences with EA had improved their mental health (36.8%) than said that it had worsened (16.4%), while 36.0% said that it had stayed the same.Men were somewhat less likely to say that [...]
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
First published:
July 28th, 2023
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NJGzmY5BNRw7fSg3z/ea-survey-2022-community-satisfaction-retention-and-mental
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In 2019, Open Philanthropy commissioned a set of forecasts on AI progress from Metaculus.[1] The forecasting questions had time horizons between 6 months and >6 years. As of June 2023,[2] 69 of the 111 questions had been resolved unambiguously. In this post, I analyze the accuracy of these forecasts as a function of question (sub)category, crowd size, and forecasting horizon. Unless otherwise indicated, my analyses are about Metaculus’ proprietary aggregate forecast (“the Metaculus prediction”) evaluated at the time the question closed.Related workFeel free to skip to the next section if you’re already familiar with these analyses. This analysis published 2 years ago (July 2021) looked at 64 resolved AI questions and concluded there was weak but ultimately inconclusive evidence of bias towards faster progress.A more recent analysis from March 2023 found that Metaculus had a worse Brier score on (some) AI questions than on average across all questions and presented a few behavioral correlates of accuracy within AI questions, e.g. accuracy was poorer on questions with more updates and when those updates were less informative in a certain technical sense (see post for details).Metaculus responded to the previous post with a more comprehensive analysis that included all resolved AI questions (152 in total, 64 of which were [...]
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First published:
July 27th, 2023
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https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/x5Re9EKwGvAjZSmeb/takeaways-from-the-metaculus-ai-progress-tournament
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Join our February-March 2024 Incubation Program to start nonprofits in Mass Media (Global Health) and Animal Welfare.In this post, we announce our top four charity ideas to launch in February 2024. They are the results of months of work by our research team, who selected them through a seven-stage research process. We pick interventions that exceed ambitious cost-effectiveness bars (e.g., for global health policy, this is 5x top GiveWell evaluated charities), have a high quality of evidence, minimal failure modes, and high expected value.We’re seeking people to launch these ideas through our February-March 2024 Incubation Program. No particular previous experience is necessary - if you could plausibly see yourself excited to launch one of these charities, we encourage you to apply. The deadline for applications is September 30, 2024.[APPLY NOW]In the Incubation Program, we provide two months of cost-covered training, stipends, funding up to $200,00, operational support in your first months, a co-working space at our CE office in London, ongoing mentorship, and access to a community of alumni, funders, and experts. Learn more on our refreshed CE Incubation Program page.Disclaimer: To be brief, we have sacrificed nuance, the details of our considerable uncertainties, and the downside risks discussed in the extended reports. Full [...]
First published:
July 27th, 2023
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https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2Nnu9ykixiqG2mMit/ce-announcing-our-february-2024-charity-ideas-apply-now
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SummaryWe are launching the Meta Charity Funders, a growing network of donors sharing knowledge and discussing funding opportunities in the EA meta space. Apply for funding by August 27th or join the circle as a donor. See below or visit our website to learn more!If you are doing EA-aligned “meta” work, and have not received substantial funding for several years, you might be worried about funding. Over the past 10 years, Open Philanthropy and EA Funds comprised a large percent of total meta funding and are far from independent of each other. This lack of diversity means potentially effective projects outside their priorities often struggle to stay afloat or scale, and the beliefs of just a few grant-makers can massively shape the EA movement’s trajectory. It can be difficult for funders within meta as well. Individual donors often don’t know where to give if they don’t share EA Funds’ approach. Thorough vetting is scarce and expensive, with only a handful of grant-makers deploying tens of millions per year in meta grants, resulting in sub-optimal allocations. This is why we are launching the Meta Charity Funders, a growing network of donors sharing knowledge, discussing funding opportunities, and running joint open grant rounds in the EA meta [...]
First published:
July 26th, 2023
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https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5WLGmCg7vSfXeqSWC/launching-the-meta-charity-funding-circle-mcf-apply-for
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SummaryQuadratic funding (QF) is a mechanism that has gained attention as a potential way to improve resource allocation in a number of philanthropic decision situations. In this post, I explain how the mechanism works, discuss some of its drawbacks, and discuss how these drawbacks relate to several proposed use cases. I argue that its drawbacks severely limit the practical applicability of the mechanism, and that QF will generally not be an attractive option for philanthropic applications.IntroductionQuadratic funding is a mechanism for providing public goods which was first proposed by Buterin, Hitzig and Weil (2019) (henceforth BHW). It is related to (but different from) quadratic voting, and has attracted attention in the philanthropic space in the past few years. For example, Gitcoin and DoraHacks are two of the main platforms that currently use QF for funding software development, with Gitcoin alone distributing over $50 million using this mechanism. WeTrust has used QF for matching donations. The effective altruism (EA) community in particular has also demonstrated interest in the mechanism. Two of its proponents were guests on the 80,000 Hours podcast (Vitalik Buterin and Glen Weyl), the paper proposing the mechanism has been cited in the GPI research agenda, and a number of EA Forum posts discuss it. One project proposal suggested [...]
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First published:
July 4th, 2023
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https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kHDjtqSiSohZAQyjG/some-thoughts-on-quadratic-funding
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Note: We (The EA NYC Team)[1] are posting this on the suggestion from this Forum post calling for more public guides for navigating EA hubs. This guide is not a representation of the views of everyone in the community. Read on for a basic overview of the EA community in New York City. Whether you are visiting, planning to attend EAGxNYC (applications still open!), have just moved here, or are considering moving, we hope this guide will provide some helpful context on our community. That said, please comment or message us if we’re missing anything - there’s a lot happening here and it’s hard to capture it all![2]And if you are planning on being in or have just arrived in NYC, get in touch with us! We’re here to help support and connect the NYC EA network. We think there’s a really special community here and Rocky, Alex, and the whole team would be happy to help you find like-minded New Yorkers. OverviewAbove: map outlining NYC’s five boroughs. Credit: Wikimedia Commons[3]NYC itselfNew York City comprises five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Each borough has its own character, as do the individual neighborhoods within the boroughs, but they are all part of New York City and are served by a united city government and public transit system. Manhattan is at the heart of the city, and is what most people think of when they think of New York City.There are also several areas immediately outside of the city that are very accessible by public transit, such as Jersey City, Hoboken, and New Jersey’s suburbs, suburbs on Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk Counties), parts of the state of Connecticut, and suburbs in upstate New York (ie. Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess Counties).Each of these areas is made up of many smaller neighborhoods, which vary dramatically in demographics, building styles, and activities.The EA community in NYC is very spread-out, and includes people in all of these areas and sometimes beyond. Of the five boroughs, Manhattan is the most densely populated, generally has the best accessibility, and usually has the most going on during the day (including anything from university research and co-working to tourism and EA NYC events). It will typically be the most expensive place to stay.Brooklyn (especially northwestern Brooklyn closer to Manhattan) and Queens (especially southwestern Queens closer to Manhattan) are also pretty centrally located and would allow access to co-working from cafes/libraries, more residential neighborhoods where some community members live, as well as more recreational options like dancing, performances, and bars.New Jersey (especially eastern New Jersey closer to Manhattan) can also provide more affordable living and decent access to Manhattan.Staten Island and the Bronx: EA NYC usually sees less representation from these boroughs, likely due to the greater geographical distance from events.A quick note on safetyMost New Yorkers consider the city very safe (to the point that our team almost forgot to mention this), and the data supports this.Overall, New York is a very safe city (despite what others would have you believe based on misconceptions rooted from [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Yq6yKgBtaMgkgyetm/an-ea-s-guide-to-visiting-new-york-city
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Hi everyone! I’ll be doing an Ask Me Anything (AMA) here. Feel free to drop your questions in the comments below. I will aim to answer them by Monday, July 24. Who am I? I’m Peter. I co-founded Rethink Priorities (RP) with Marcus A. Davis in 2018. Previously, I worked as a data scientist in industry for five years. I’m an avid forecaster. I’ve been known to tweet here and blog here.What does Rethink Priorities do? RP is a research and implementation group that works with foundations and impact-focused non-profits to identify pressing opportunities to make the world better, figures out strategies for working on those problems, and does that work.We focus on:Wild and farmed animal welfare (including invertebrate welfare)Global health and development (including climate change)AI governance and strategyExistential security and safeguarding a flourishing long-term futureUnderstanding and supporting communities relevant to the above What should you ask me? Anything!I oversee RP’s work related to existential security, AI, and surveys and data analysis research, but I can answer any question about RP (or anything).I’m also excited to answer questions about the organization’s future plans and our funding gaps (see here for more information). We're pretty funding constrained right now and could use some help!We also recently published a personal reflection on what Marcus and I have learned in the last five years as well as a review of the organization’s impacts, future plans, and funding needs that you might be interested in or have questions about. RP’s publicly available research can be found in this database. If you’d like to support RP’s mission, please donate here or contact Director of Development Janique Behman.To stay up-to-date on our work, please subscribe to our newsletter or engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/db5TbLPSZL2XPeaed/ama-peter-wildeford-co-ceo-at-rethink-priorities
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We just published an interview: Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impact. You can click through for the audio, a full transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.Episode summaryWe’re in a universe where tradeoffs exist, we have finite resources, we have multiple things we care about, and we have incomplete information. So we have to make guesses and take risks — and that hurts. So I think self-compassion and acceptance come in here, like, “Damn, I so am wishing this were not the case, and by golly, it looks like it still is.”And then I think that it’s a matter of recognising that we aren’t going to score 100% on any unitary definition of “rightness.” And then recognise that, “Well, I could just look at that and stall out forever, or I could make some moves.” And probably making moves is preferable to stalling out.- Hannah BoettcherIn this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Hannah Boettcher discuss 4 different kinds of therapy, and how to use them in practice — focusing specifically on people trying to have a big impact.They cover:The effectiveness of therapy, and tips for finding a therapistMoral demandingnessInternal family systems-style therapyMotivation and burnoutExposure therapyGrappling with world problems and x-riskPerfectionism and imposter syndromeAnd the risk of over-intellectualisingWho this episode is for:High-impact focused people who struggle with moral demandingness, perfectionism, or imposter syndromePeople who feel anxious thinking about the end of the world80,000 Hours Podcast hosts with the initials LRWho this episode isn’t for:People who aren’t focused on having a big impactPeople who don’t struggle with any mental health issuesFounders of Scientology with the initials LRHGet this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.Producer: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Dominic ArmstrongContent editing: Katy Moore, Luisa Rodriguez, and Keiran HarrisTranscriptions: Katy Moore“Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue, original 1924 version” by Jason Weinberger is licensed under creative commonsHighlightsWhat makes therapy more or less effective?Hannah Boettcher: So broadly speaking, we have known for a long time, and it’s not controversial, that psychotherapy is efficacious and effective — so under control settings and less controlled settings. And in meta-analytic evidence, the effect size of psychotherapy is approximately 0.8 in comparison to no treatment — and that’s conventionally considered a large effect size. Another way to say this would be that in comparison to not getting therapy, getting therapy explains 14%ish of the outcomes in randomised controlled trials. 14% might not sound great, depending on what your priors are, but this is actually really good for healthcare: it’s on par with or better than effects of medications, both psychiatric and medically, and it’s superior to plenty of medical interventions that are considered effective.Luisa Rodriguez: What do we know about how effective different types of therapy are? Are those compared in studies?Hannah Boettcher: Yes, [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o5vJ9aNvc7twdqDxv/the-mental-health-challenges-that-come-with-trying-to-have-a
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ContextVida Plena (meaning ‘a flourishing life’ in Spanish) is a new nonprofit organization based in Quito, Ecuador which launched last year (see our launch post here). Our mission is to build strong mental health in low-income and refugee communities, who otherwise would have no access to care. We provide evidence-based depression treatment using group interpersonal therapy, which is highly cost-effective and scalable (see our predictive cost-effectiveness analysis for more details). Pilot ResultsAfter completing the Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) Incubator program in the summer of 2022, we ran our pilot last fall/winter. We are pleased to now share results (baseline/endline comparisons) from the pilot. A few highlights:We had a total of 10 therapy groups and 55 people in the pilot75% of people had a clinically significant reduction in their depression symptoms 50% of people had improvements in the secondary indicators of anxiety and PTSDI owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dr. Melanie Basnak from Rethink Priorities, who volunteered her time to conduct the data analysis for us.Read the full report here.Next StepsWe are currently analyzing the 3 month and 6 month follow up data. Given the initial positive results, we have continued our programs this year, treating an additional 250 people to date.In 2024 we hope to scale our program and continue to conduct program evaluations involving a control group.We would love to stay in touch and keep you up to date with our workSign up here for email updatesWe’re also on instagram: @vidaplena.globalIf you want to help, please tell others in your network about us: the best connections are unexpected. We are looking to connect with people and organizations involved in global mental health, both in industry and academia. Feel feel free to reach out at joy@vidaplena.globalAnd of course, we welcome any donations to help support our mission and work.Our incredible group of community facilitators who were certified in interpersonal therapy by Columbia University for the pilot. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kM9NFhZnXphEFiCFc/from-vision-to-reality-vida-plena-s-pilot-results
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This post was co-authored by the Forecasting Research Institute and Rose Hadshar. Thanks to Josh Rosenberg for managing this work, Zachary Jacobs and Molly Hickman for the underlying data analysis, Coralie Consigny and Bridget Williams for fact-checking and copy-editing, the whole FRI XPT team for all their work on this project, and our external reviewers.In 2022, the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) ran the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT). From June through October 2022, 169 forecasters, including 80 superforecasters and 89 experts, developed forecasts on various questions related to existential and catastrophic risk. Forecasters moved through a four-stage deliberative process that was designed to incentivize them not only to make accurate predictions but also to provide persuasive rationales that boosted the predictive accuracy of others’ forecasts. Forecasters stopped updating their forecasts on 31st October 2022, and are not currently updating on an ongoing basis. FRI plans to run future iterations of the tournament, and open up the questions more broadly for other forecasters.You can see the overall results of the XPT here.Some of the questions were related to AI risk. This post:Sets out the XPT forecasts on AI risk, and puts them in context.Lays out the arguments given in the XPT for and against these forecasts.Offers some thoughts on what these forecasts and arguments show us about AI risk.TL;DRXPT superforecasters predicted that catastrophic and extinction risk from AI by 2030 is very low (0.01% catastrophic risk and 0.0001% extinction risk).XPT superforecasters predicted that catastrophic risk from nuclear weapons by 2100 is almost twice as likely as catastrophic risk from AI by 2100 (4% vs 2.13%).XPT superforecasters predicted that extinction risk from AI by 2050 and 2100 is roughly an order of magnitude larger than extinction risk from nuclear, which in turn is an order of magnitude larger than non-anthropogenic extinction risk (see here for details).XPT superforecasters more than quadruple their forecasts for AI extinction risk by 2100 if conditioned on AGI or TAI by 2070 (see here for details). XPT domain experts predicted that AI extinction risk by 2100 is far greater than XPT superforecasters do (3% for domain experts, and 0.38% for superforecasters by 2100).Although XPT superforecasters and experts disagreed substantially about AI risk, both superforecasters and experts still prioritized AI as an area for marginal resource allocation (see here for details).It’s unclear how accurate these forecasts will prove, particularly as superforecasters have not been evaluated on this timeframe before.[1]The forecastsIn the table below, we present forecasts from the following groups:Superforecasters: median forecast across superforecasters in the XPT.Domain experts: median forecasts across all AI experts in the XPT.(See our discussion of aggregation choices (pp. 20–22) for why we focus on medians.)QuestionForecastersN203020502100AI Catastrophic risk (>10% of humans die within 5 years)Superforecasters880.01%0.73%2.13%Domain experts300.35%5%12%AI Extinction risk (human population <5,000)Superforecasters880.0001%0.03%0.38%Domain experts290.02%1.1%3%The forecasts in contextDifferent methods have been used to estimate AI risk:Surveying experts of various kinds, e.g. Sanders and Bostrom, 2008; Grace et al. 2017.Doing in-depth investigations, e.g. Ord, 2020; Carlsmith, 2021.The XPT forecasts are distinctive relative to expert surveys in that:The forecasts were incentivized: for long-run questions, XPT used ‘reciprocal scoring’ rules to incentivize accurate forecasts (see here for details).Forecasts were solicited from superforecasters as well [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/K2xQrrXn5ZSgtntuT/what-do-xpt-forecasts-tell-us-about-ai-risk-1
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Since writing The Precipice, one of my aims has been to better understand how reducing existential risk compares with other ways of influencing the l… Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Doa69pezbZBqrcucs/shaping-humanity-s-longterm-trajectory
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Formerly known as "Aaron's Epistemic Stories", which stops working as a title when it's on the Forum and people aren't required to read it.What is this post?A story about how I reacted poorly to my first few EA job rejections, and what I learned from reflecting on my mistakes.Context: When I worked at CEA, my colleague was working on EA Virtual Program curricula. She asked me to respond to this prompt:"What made you start caring about having good epistemics? What made you start trying to improve your epistemics? Why?"I wrote a meandering, stream-of-consciousness response and shared it. I assumed it would either be ignored or briefly summarized as part of a larger piece. Instead, it — went directly to the curriculum for the In-Depth Program?That was a surprise.[1] It was a much bigger surprise when people started reaching out to tell me how much it had helped them: maybe a dozen times over the last two years. From the emails alone, it seems to be the most important thing I've written.[2]So I'm sharing a lightly edited version on the Forum, in case it helps anyone else. Recovering from rejectionAfter I graduated from college, I took the most profitable job I could find, at a company in a cheap city. I wanted to save money so I could be flexible later. So far, so good.I started an EA group at the company, which kept me thinking about effective altruism on a regular basis even without my college group. It wasn’t nearly as fun to run as the college group — people who work full-time jobs don't like extra meetings, and my co-organizers kept getting other jobs and leaving. But I still felt like “part of EA”.Eventually, I decided to move on from the company. So I applied to GiveWell, got to the very last step of the application process… and got rejected.Well, I thought, I guess it makes sense that I’m not qualified for an EA job. My grades weren’t great, and I was never a big researcher in college. Time to do something else.(This is a story about a mistake. Do you see it?)I moved to San Diego and spent the next 18 months as a freelance tutor and writer, feeling generally dissatisfied with my life. My local group met rarely and far away; I had no car, I was busy with family stuff, and I became less and less engaged with EA.Through an old connection, I was introduced to a couple who ran an EA-aligned foundation and lived nearby. I ended up doing part-time operations work for them — reading papers, emailing charities with questions, and other EA-flavored stuff.This boosted my confidence and led me to think harder about my career, though I kept running into limitations. For example, GiveDirectly’s CEO wanted to hire a research assistant for his lab at UCSD, but I’d totally forgotten my old R classes and wasn’t a good candidate, despite having a great connection from my operations work. There goes maybe the best opportunity I’ll ever [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NDRBZNc2sBy5MC8Fw/recovering-from-rejection-my-piece-for-the-in-depth-ea
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Overview This piece highlights Rethink Priorities’ accomplishments, mistakes, and changes since its establishment in 2018. We discuss RP’s future plans as well as potential constraints to our impact. Finally, we call for donations and invite people to engage in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) discussion with Co-CEO Peter Wildeford that will be announced by July 19 in our newsletter and social media.You can also read this post as a PDF with visualizations. Executive summaryKey accomplishments (2018-2023) In five years, RP has published over 125 pieces of research, completed more than another 100 research projects, provided various grantmakers with consultation, influenced tens of millions of dollars in funding, fiscally sponsored nine projects, and drove forward the promising field of invertebrate welfare. Specific accomplishments include:Collaborating with dozens of European Union (EU) animal advocacy organizations to work on setting medium-term policy strategies for farmed animal welfare.Providing expert consultation to the Chilean government as they considered a bill (which has advanced to the next legislative stage) to recognize animals as sentient.Contributing significantly to burgeoning fields, such as invertebrate welfare—including work related to shrimps and insects (see more here).Completing the Moral Weight Project to try to help funders decide how to best allocate resources across species.Producing 23 reports commissioned by Open Philanthropy answering their questions about global health and development issues and interventions.Conducting 205 tailored surveys and data analysis to help several organizations that build communities of people working on global priorities.Launching projects such as Condor Camp and fiscally sponsoring organizations like Epoch and Apollo Research via our Special Projects team, which provides operational support. Setting up an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Governance and Strategy team. Growing from a two-person operation in 2018 to a team that will soon include 75 RP employees, 30 contractors, and 25 staff of fiscally sponsored projects. Mistakes and challengesWe believe that some of RP’s past projects failed because we did not adequately consider the project’s probability of success, its potential value, and the resources required. For example, our 2018 PriorityWiki project would have involved a large volunteer coordination effort we weren’t well-placed to execute, and it is unclear how valuable it would have been even if successful. Our biggest early mistake was not building a plan for each project’s path to influence and not putting enough resources into measuring our impact. We initially relied too much on producing research and hoping that it would be impactful just by existing. Thus far, we have not publicly shared as much of our existing internal impact tracking as we had initially intended due to time constraints. While we did some preparation prior to scaling in 2022, we would have liked to have established more robust project management systems beforehand. Our project timelines are not always predictable, as it is difficult to determine when you should stop researching due to diminishing returns. We think there are several cases where we spent too long working on a piece of research and would’ve had more impact by releasing the work earlier. ChangesWe now have better project management systems and spend much more time thinking through how to communicate our research and ensure each [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7QyemcXLaxNicLNNa/five-years-of-rethink-priorities-impact-future-plans-funding
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Do you want tobecome more fulfilled, resilient, and productive?practice evidence-based tools to deal with blockers and stressors such as low energy levels, anxiety, imposter syndrome, and perfectionism?embark on that journey with other members of the community? Apply for our summer program in ~15 min here! Spaces are limited. TL;DRRethink Wellbeing is announcing an online Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Program from August-October 2023. This program is designed to help improve mental wellbeing and productivity for people in the EA community. Using the latest psychotherapeutic and behavior change techniques, participants attend weekly group sessions together with 5-8 well-matched peers, led by a trained facilitator, and engage in readings and application of the learned tools in between the sessions. This program requires 8 weeks of commitment, with a total of 4-6h/week. Usually, therapy costs $100-$200 for just one hour, and in our program, you'll get 8 sessions plus a community of like-minded individuals for free. What does the program consist of?The program is experiential and practice-based; you’ll learn through repeated, deliberate practice, so your new skills can eventually become automatic and habitual. We will draw on techniques backed by a wealth of cutting-edge research, particularly those from the gold standard of third-wave CBT. These techniques can be applied to a variety of target areas: anxiety, low mood, perfectionism, procrastination, self-esteem, productivity, and more. You can learn more about CBT here. The program involves:Weekly participationA group video conference, led by a trained peer facilitator, ranging from 1,5 to 2 hours, designed for sharing personal experiences, bonding, initiating discussions, and practicing newly learned techniques together. In between sessions: A reading and home practice of new skills and techniques (~2-4h/week or ~30 min/day)Program evaluation surveysShort weekly forms for progress tracking, reflections, and feedback (< 5 min each)Surveys on your mental well-being at weeks 0, 6, 8, and 12 (~20 min each) We ask that people who sign up be ready to commit to the entire program, which is essential because:You are most likely to maximize your benefits from the program by dedicating time to the weekly sessions, readings, and home practice.Your peers will rely on you. You will go on this journey with a small group, handpicked for you. Poor participation or dropping out can challenge the group’s dynamics and spirit. We will only be able to determine whether the program is effective and scalable if everyone engages fully.Why do we think the program will be effective? Mental health research suggests that peer-guided self-help groups working with evidence-based therapy methods can improve mental wellbeing and productivity just as much as 1:1 therapy. In addition, Rethink Wellbeing’s pilot tests of peer-facilitated groups showed promising results: Participants’ psychological well-being significantly increased (p < .05).Productivity, perfectionism, and self-leadership increased in the correspondingly themed groups.All participants rated the programs as “Good” or “Excellent”.3 of 5 groups decided to continue meeting.You can learn more about the rationale and background behind our method on our website. How do I sign-up?If you are interested in participating in the program, you can apply within ~15 min here. If you are interested in facilitating a group, you can apply within ~20 min here. Details will follow in [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cZwQWeThqgXxmuFpG/boost-your-mental-health-to-grow-your-impact-announcing-our
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Why write a post about theories of change?As participants of a movement with ‘effective’ in its name, it’s easy to think of ourselves as being above falling for the most common mistakes made in the non-profit sector more broadly. We’re grappling with the cutting-edge stuff, not the basics, right?But we need to beware of this kind of complacency. It’s crucial to nail the basics, like theories of change, and far fewer EA organizations do this than you’d expect. That includes Charity Entrepreneurship, the organization I work at, where we teach participants in our Incubation Program and Foundation Program about the importance of theories of change, and yet until today we didn’t even have our own theory of change on our website!That’s why we decided to share this post on theories of change – potentially the first of a series on ‘nailing the basics’ of effective non-profit work, if people are interested. This post is mostly made up of an excerpt from our forthcoming book (‘How to Launch a High-Impact Foundation’). If you’d like to be notified when this book published, you can let us know here.TL;DRIt is very common for non-profit organizations (even EA orgs) to have no public theory of change, or to have a poor one. This is a big problem, because theories of change are the business models of the nonprofit world – you shouldn’t launch or fund a project that doesn’t have a strong one! A theory of change explicitly articulates the cause-and-effect steps for how a project or organization can turn inputs into a desired impact on the world (i.e. it’s their theory of how they’ll make a change). They generally include the following sections:Inputs / activities: What the project or organization does to create change (e.g. “distribute bednets”)Outputs: The tangible effects generated by the inputs (e.g. “beneficiaries have access to malaria nets”)Intermediate outcomes: The outputs’ effects, including benefits for the beneficiary, (e.g. “malaria nets are used” and "reduced incidence of malaria")Impact: What we’re ultimately solving, and why the intermediate outcomes matter (e.g. “lives saved”)Best practices when crafting a theory of change (i.e. for creators):Invest sufficiently in understanding the problem context (i.e. understanding the needs and incentives of the beneficiaries and other stakeholders, as well as barriers to change and the economic & political context)Map the causal pathway backwards from impact to activitiesQuestion every causal step (is it clear why A should cause B? how might it fail?)Hallmarks of an excellent theory of change (i.e. for reviewers):A focused suite of activities (because of the heuristic that more programs tends to signal lower cost-effectiveness)The evidence or assumptions behind each step are explicitly namedThe relative confidence of each step is clearIt is clear who the actor is in each stepCommon mistakes to avoid in theories of change are:Not making fundamental impact the goal (e.g., stopping at ‘increased immunizations’ instead of ‘improved health’)Being insufficiently detailed: (a) making large leaps between each step, (b) combining multiple major outcomes into one step (e.g. ‘government introduces and enforces regulation’).Setting and forgetting (instead of regularly iterating [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9t7St3pfEEiDsQ2Tr/nailing-the-basics-theories-of-change
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IntroductionProblems with “good minus bad” viewsWellbeing is often defined as the balance of that which is good for oneself over that which is bad for oneself. For instance, hedonism typically equates wellbeing with pleasure minus pain, and preferentialism often sees wellbeing as the difference between fulfilled and unfulfilled preferences. Similarly, objective list theories may posit multiple independent goods and bads that contribute to one’s overall wellbeing.A crucial challenge for these “good minus bad” conceptions of wellbeing is their reliance on an offsetting theory of aggregation. That is, they assume that any independent bads can always be counterbalanced, outweighed, or offset by a sufficient addition of independent goods, at least at the individual level.This offsetting premise has more problems than are commonly recognized, including the often sidelined question of what justifies it in the first place (Vinding, 2020a, 2022). Interpersonally, it plays a key role in generating moral implications that many would consider unacceptable, such as ‘Creating Hell to Please the Blissful’ (Ajantaival, 2022a, sec. 2.5; 2022b). At the individual level, it implies that a rollercoaster life containing unbearable agony and a sufficient amount of independent goods has greater wellbeing than does a perfectly untroubled life. These issues highlight the importance of exploring alternative conceptions of wellbeing that do not rely on the offsetting premise.Figure 1. All else equal, can agony always be offset by adding enough happy moments elsewhere, even within a life?Figure 2. The supposed balance of goods over bads within a rollercoaster life.Minimalist alternativesMinimalist views provide a unique perspective by rejecting the notion of independent goods. Instead, they define things that are good for us in entirely relational terms, namely in terms of the minimization of one or more sources of illbeing.[1] These views avoid the problems specific to the offsetting premise, yet they are often overlooked in existing overviews of wellbeing theories, which tend to focus only on the variety of “good minus bad” views on offer.[2] However, not only do minimalist views deserve serious consideration for their comparative merits, they can also, as I hope to show in this post, be positively intuitive in their own right.In particular, I hope to show that minimalist views can make sense of the practical tradeoffs that many of us reflectively endorse, with no need for the offsetting premise in the first place. And because many minimalist views focus on a single common currency of value, they may be promising candidates for resolving theoretical conflicts between multiple, seemingly intrinsic values. By contrast, all “good minus bad” views are still pluralistic in that they involve at least two distinct value entities.[3]Although minimalist views do not depend on the idea of an independent good, they still provide principled answers to the question of what makes life better for an individual. Moreover, in practice, it is essential to always view the narrow question of ‘better for oneself’ within the broader context of ‘better overall’. In this context, all minimalist views agree that life can be worth living and protecting for its overall positive roles.This essay delves into a selection of minimalist views on wellbeing, not [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oJJLgJTsQKX3oQ9xw/minimalist-views-of-wellbeing
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We’re experimenting with a weekly newsletter format, to surface the best grants and activity on Manifund!Overall reflectionsIt’s been a week since we announced our regrantor program. How are we feeling?Very happy with the publicity and engagement around our grant proposals#1 on Hacker News, multiple good EA Forum posts, and 7 new grassroots donorsFeels like this validates our strategy of posting grant proposals in public…Happy with the caliber of regrantors who’ve applied for budgetsWe’ve gotten 15 applications; have onboarded 2 and shortlisted 4 moreNow thinking about further fundraising, so we can give budgets to these awesome folksHappy with grantee experience for the handful of grants we’ve madeLess happy with total grantmaking quantity and dollar volume so farIn total, we’ve committed about $70k across 6 large grantsWhere’s the bottleneck? Some guesses: regrantors are busy people; writeups take a while; “funder chicken” when waiting for others to make grantsTo address this, we’re running a virtual “grantathon” to work on grant writeups & reviews! Join us next Wed evening, 6-9pm PT on this Google Meet.Grant of the weekThis week’s featured grant is to Matthew Cameron Farrugi, for introductory resources for Singular Learning Theory! In the words of Adam Gleave, the regrantor who initiated this:There's been an explosion of interest in Singular Learning Theory lately in the alignment community, and good introductory resources could save people a lot of time. A scholarly literature review also has the benefit of making this area more accessible to the ML research community more broadly. Matthew seems well placed to conduct this, having already familiarized himself with the field during his MS thesis and collected a database of papers. He also has extensive teaching experience and experience writing publications aimed at the ML research community.In need of fundingSome of our favorite proposals which could use more funding:1. Aaron Silverbook: recreate the cavity-preventing GMO bacteria BCS3-L1 from precursorA proposal to cure cavities, forever. Very out-of-left-field (Aaron: “it certainly isn't great for our Weirdness Points budget”), but I’m a fan of the ambition and the team behind it. We’re currently seeing how Manifund can make an equity investment in Lantern Bioworks.Also: this proposal hit #1 on Hacker News, with 260 upvotes & 171 comments. Shoutout to our friend Evan Conrad for posting + tweeting this out!2. Holly Elmore: Organizing people for a frontier AI moratoriumHolly has a stellar track record at Rethink Priorities and Harvard EA (not to mention a killer blog). She’s now looking to pivot to AI moratorium movement-organizing! As a grant that may include political advocacy, we’re still seeing to what extent our 501c3 can fund this; in the meantime, Holly has set up a separate GoFundMe for individual donors.3. Shrimp Welfare Project: Electrical stunnersPilot of electrical stunners to reduce shrimp suffering. Recommended by regrantor Marcus Abramovitch, as the one of the most exciting & unfunded opportunities in the entire space of animal welfare.In a thorough EA Forum post, Matt investigates the cost-effectiveness of this proposal — it’s a thoughtful writeup, take a look at the entire thing! [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GNBJjBdMokxBrtvfK/manifund-what-we-re-funding-week-1
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https://manifund.substack.com/p/what-were-funding-week-1
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This is a linkpost for our new and improved public dashboard, masquerading as a mini midyear updateIt’s been a turbulent few months, but amidst losing an Executive Director, gaining an Interim Managing Director, and searching for a CEO[1], CEA has done lots of cool stuff so far in 2023.The headline numbers[2]4,336 conference attendees (2,695 EA Global, 1,641 EAGx)133,041 hours of engagement on the Forum, including 60,507 hours of engagement with non-Community posts26 university groups and 33 organizers in UGAP622 participants in Virtual Programs[3]There’s much more, including historical data and a wider range of metrics, in the dashboard!UpdatesThe work of our Community Health & Special Projects and Communications teams lend themselves less easily to stat-stuffing, but you can read recent updates from both:Community Health & Special Projects: Updates and Contacting UsHow CEA’s communications team is thinking about EA communications at the momentWhat else is new?Our staff, like many others in the community (and beyond), have spent more time this year thinking about how we should respond to the rapidly evolving AI landscape. We expect more of the community’s attention and resources to be directed toward AI safety at the margin, and are asking ourselves how best to balance this with principles-first EA community building.Any major changes to our strategy will have to wait until our new CEO is in place, but we have been looking for opportunities to improve our situational awareness and experiment with new products, including:Exploring and potentially organizing a large conference focussed on existential risk and/or AI safetyLearning more about and potentially supporting some AI safety groupsSupporting AI safety communications effortsThese projects are not yet ready to be announcements or commitments, but we thought it worth sharing at a high level as a guide to the direction of our thinking. If they intersect with your projects or plans, please let us know and we’ll be happy to discuss more.It’s worth reiterating that our priorities haven’t changed since we wrote about our work in 2022: helping people who have heard about EA to deeply understand the ideas, and to find opportunities for making an impact in important fields. We continue to think that top-of-funnel growth is likely already at or above healthy levels, so rather than aiming to increase the rate any further, we want to make that growth go well.You can read more about our strategy here, including how we make some of the key decisions we are responsible for, and a list of things we are not focusing on. And it remains the case that we do not think of ourselves as having or wanting control over the EA community. We believe that a wide range of ideas and approaches are consistent with the core principles underpinning EA, and encourage others to identify and experiment with filling gaps left by our work.Impact storiesAnd finally, it wouldn’t be a CEA update without a few #impact-stories:[4]OnlineTraining for Good posted about their EU Tech Policy Fellowship on the EA Forum. 12/100+ applicants they received came from the Forum, and 6 of these 12 successfully made it on to the program, out of [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xSvTArtzxBcnrD6tk/cea-still-doing-cea-things
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tl;dr__T3A_INLINE_LATEX_PLACEHOLDER___^2___T3A_INLINE_LATEX_END_PLACEHOLDER__: Data on EA Forum posts and topics doesn't show clear 'waves' of EAtl;dr: I used the Forum API to collect data on the trends of EA Forum topics over time. While this analysis is by no means definitive, it doesn't support the simple narrative that there was a golden age of EA that has abandoned for a much worse one. There has been a rise in AI Safety posts, but that has also been fairly recent (within the last ~2 years)1. IntroductionI really liked Ben West's recent post about 'Third Wave Effective Altruism', especially for its historical reflection on what First and Second Wave EA looked like. This characterisation of EA's history seemed to strike a chord with many Forum users,[1] and has been reflected in recent critical coverage of EA that claims the movement has abandoned its well-intentioned roots (e.g. donations for bed nets) and decided to focus fully on bizarre risks to save a distant, hypothetical future.[2]I've always been a bit sceptical with how common this sort of framing seems to be, especially since the best evidence we have from funding for the overall EA picture shows that most funding is still going to Global Health areas. As something of a (data) scientist myself, I thought I'd turn to one of the primary sources of information for what EAs think to shed some more light on this problem - the Forum itself!This post is a write-up of the initial data collection and analysis that followed. It's not meant to be the definitive word on either how EA, or use of the EA Forum, has changed over time. Instead, I hope it will challenge some assumptions and intuitions, prompt some interesting discussion, and hopefully leads to future posts in a similar direction either from myself or others.2. Methodology(Feel free to skip this section if you're not interested in all the caveats)You may not be aware, the Forum has an API! While I couldn't find clear documentation on how to use it or a fully defined schema, people have used it in the past for interesting projects and some have very kindly shared their results & methods. I found these following three especially useful (the first two have linked GitHubs with their code):The Tree of Tags by Filip SondejEffective Altruism Data from HamishThis LessWrong tutorial from Issa RiceWith these examples to help me, I created my own code to get every post made on the EA Forum to date (without those who have deleted their post).There are various caveats to make about the data representation and data quality. These include:I extracted the data on July 7th - so any totals (e.g. number of posts, post score etc) or other details are only correct as of that date.I could only extract the postedAt date - which isn't always when the post in question was actually posted. A case in point, I'm pretty sure this post wasn't actually posted in 1972. However, it's the best data I could find, so hopefully for [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vjX2qAiD7JZLmGCs9/ea-eda-what-do-forum-topics-tell-us-about-changes-in-ea
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Epistemic status: layperson’s attempt to understand the relevant considerations. I welcome corrections from anyone with a better understanding of welfare biology SummaryThe Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has a novel opportunity to spend up to $115,500 to purchase and install electric stunners at multiple shrimp farmsThe stunners would be used to stun shrimp prior to slaughter, likely rendering them unconscious and thereby preventing suffering that is currently experienced when shrimp asphyxiate or freeze without effective analgesics Based on formal agreements SWP has signed with multiple producers, raising $115,500 would enable the stunning (rather than rather than conventional slaughtering) of 1.7 billion shrimp over the next three years, for a ratio of nearly 15000 shrimp/dollar I performed a preliminary cost-effectiveness analysis of this initiative and reached the following three tentative conclusions:The expected cost-effectiveness distribution for electric shrimp stunning likely overlaps that of corporate hen welfare campaignsThe cost-effectiveness of electric shrimp stunning is more likely to be lower than that of corporate hen welfare campaigns than it is to be higherShrimp stunning is a very heavy-tailed intervention. The mean cost-effectiveness of stunning is significantly influenced by a few extreme cases, which mostly represent instances in which the undiluted experience model of welfare turns out to be correctGiven these results, electric shrimp stunning might be worth supporting as a somewhat speculative bet in the animal welfare space. Considerations that might drive donor decisions on this project include risk tolerance, credence in the undiluted experience model of welfare, and willingness to take a hits-based giving approach.Description of the OpportunityThe following information is quoted from the project description written by Marcus Abramovitch on the Manifund donation platform, based on information provided by Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla (CEO of SWP) : Project summaryShrimp Welfare Project is an organization of people who believe that shrimps are capable of suffering and deserve our moral consideration [1]. We aim to cost-effectively reduce the suffering of billions of shrimps and envision a world where shrimps don't suffer needlessly.Programme: our current most impactful intervention is to place electrical stunners with producers ($60k/stunner): We have signed agreements with 2 producers willing and able to use electrical stunning technology as part of their slaughter process which will materially reduce the acute suffering at the last few minutes / hours of shrimps lives. Collectively, these 2 agreements will impact more than half a billion animals per year at a rate of more than 4,000 shrimps/dollar/annum. Please take a look at our blog post on the first agreement here. We are in advanced negotiations with 2 more producers which would take the number of animals to more than 1 billion shrimps per annum.See our back-of-the-envelope calculation for the number of shrimps and cost-effectiveness analysis hereProject goalsSimplified end-game of this programme: the interim goal of placing these stunners with selected producers in different contexts/systems is to remove some perceived obstacles to the industry and show major retailers and other shrimp buyers that electrical stunning is something they can demand from their supply chain The ultimate goal is for electrical stunning to be:widely adopted by medium to large shrimp producers [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CmAexqqvnRLcBojpB/electric-shrimp-stunning-a-potential-high-impact-donation
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This is an animation of The Goddess of Everything Else, by Scott Alexander. I hope you enjoy it :) Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qYfH7qMGtvg6CTshB/the-goddess-of-everything-else-the-animation
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https://youtu.be/Bbwp4PbWYzw
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This post describes the winning submissions of AI Alignment Awards. We offered prizes for novel contributions to the problems of goal misgeneralization and corrigibility. (For more context, see this post and our site.) SummaryWe received 118 submissions. Of these, 5 received honorary mention prizes ($1000) and 7 won final prizes ($5000-16000). The rest of the post summarizes the 7 winning submissions, including comments from our judges. (You can see winners’ full submissions on our site.)Goal Misgeneralization winnersThane Ruthenis ($11,000)AbstractGoal misgeneralization primarily happens because the system under training latches not upon the goal it's being trained for, but upon an upstream correlate of that goal — like human love for their children is an upstream correlate of inclusive genetic fitness.What complicates this problem are suspicions of path-dependence. It's not overdetermined what values a given system subjected to a given selection pressure will learn. Rather, every next value learned is also a function of the values the system has already learned, such that the entire process can only be predicted step-by-step, no "skipping to the end" allowed.I provide a mathematical framework (see the attachment) that formalizes "upstream correlates of goals", and gestures at a possible formalization of path-dependence. Optimistically, an improved version of this framework may serve as a full predictive model of path-dependence, one that would allow us to calculate precisely how we should set up a training loop in order to get the heuristics/shards we want.The issues are twofold:The process of value formation may not, in fact, be realistically predictable. It may be highly sensitive to random noise and perturbations (akin to the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis), meaning no robust predictive model is possible."Shard-ecology alignment" does not equal "robust AGI alignment". Even the perfectly working version of this method would only do the equivalent of aligning the would-be AGI's base urges, not the values it'll settle on after it engages in its version of moral philosophy. And "moral reflection" may itself be a highly unstable process.Nevertheless, a robust theory of path-dependence may be possible, and may be an important part of some more complete solution to inner alignment.This submission demonstrates an unusually strong grasp of the “upstream correlates” issue. The proposal itself isn’t particularly promising, as the author recognizes. But it does demonstrate a relatively-strong understanding of one part of the alignment problem, in a way orthogonal to the parts which people usually understand best.Pedro Afonso Oitavén de Sousa ($6,000) AbstractThe idea consists of a way of creating potentially scalable explanations (“approximate proofs”, like what ARC was trying to do) of why the circuit formed by a learned world model + utility function + RL agent has the output distribution it has. Then the explanation and the agent would be jointly optimized to be able to show that the agent achieves a high expected return in a set of situations much more varied than the distribution of the training data.It would start by taking the temporally unrolled circuit mapping random variables to utilities (for now for a finite number of time steps, but this seems possible [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ScGZdyGNXoEBAQazR/winners-of-ai-alignment-awards-research-contest
Linkpost URL:
alignmentawards.com/winners
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I would like to thank Lant Pritchett, David Roodman and Matt Lerner for their invaluable comments.You can follow these links to comments from Lant Pritchett and David Roodman.A number of EA forum posts (1, 2) have pointed out that effective altruism has not been interested in education interventions, whether that is measured by funding from GiveWell or Open Philanthropy, or writing by 80,000 hours. Based on brief conversations with people who have explored education at EA organizations and reading GiveWell’s report on the topic, I believe most of the reason for this comes down to two concerns about the existing evidence that drive very steep discounts to expected income effects of most interventions. The first of these is skepticism about the potential for years of schooling to drive income gains because the quasi-experimental evidence for these effects is not very robust. The second is the lack of RCT evidence linking specific interventions in low and middle income countries (LMICs) to income gains.I believe the first concern can be addressed by focusing on the evidence for the income gains from interventions that boost student achievement rather than the weaker evidence around interventions that increase years of schooling. The second concern can be addressed in the same way that GiveWell has addressed less-than-ideal evidence for income effects for their other interventions: looking broadly for evidence across the academic literature, and then applying a discount to the expected result based on the strength of the evidence. In this case that means including relevant studies outside of the LMIC context and those that examine country-level effects. I identify five separate lines of evidence that all find similar long-term income impacts of education interventions that boost test scores. None of these lines of evidence is strong on its own, with some suffering from weak evidence for causality, others from contexts different from those where the most cost-effective charities operate, and yet others from small sample sizes or the possibility of negative effects on non-program participants. However, by converging on similar estimates from a broader range of evidence than EA organizations have considered, the evidence becomes compelling. I will argue that the combined evidence for the income impacts of interventions that boost test scores is much stronger than the evidence GiveWell has used to value the income effects of fighting malaria, deworming, or making vaccines, vitamin A, and iodine more available. Even after applying very conservative discounts to expected effect sizes to account for the applicability of the evidence to potential funding opportunities, we find the best education interventions to be in the same range of cost-effectiveness as GiveWell’s top charities.The argument proceeds as follows:I. There are five separate lines of academic literature all pointing to income gains that are surprisingly clustered around the average value of 19% per standard deviation (SD) increase in test scores. They come to these estimates using widely varying levels of analysis and techniques, and between them address all of the major alternative explanations. A. The most direct evidence for the likely impact of charities that [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8qXrou57tMGz8cWCL/are-education-interventions-as-cost-effective-as-the-top
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IntroductionAI safety is a field concerned with preventing negative outcomes from AI systems and ensuring that AI is beneficial to humanity. The field does research on problems such as the AI alignment problem which is the problem of designing AI systems that follow user intentions and behave in a desirable and beneficial way.Understanding and solving AI safety problems may involve reading past research, producing new research in the form of papers or posts, running experiments with ML models, and so on. Producing research typically involves many different inputs such as research staff, compute, equipment, and office space.These inputs all require funding and therefore funding is a crucial input for enabling or accelerating AI safety research. Securing funding is usually a prerequisite for starting or continuing AI safety research in industry, in an academic setting, or independently.There are many barriers that could prevent people from working on AI safety. Funding is one of them. Even if someone is working on AI safety, a lack of funding may prevent them from continuing to work on it.It’s not clear how hard AI safety problems like AI alignment are. But in any case, humanity is more likely to solve them if there are hundreds or thousands of brilliant minds working on them rather than one guy. I would like there to be a large and thriving community of people working on AI safety and I think funding is an important prerequisite for enabling that.The goal of this post is to give the reader a better understanding of funding opportunities in AI safety so that hopefully funding will be less of a barrier if they want to work on AI safety. The post starts with a high-level overview of the AI safety funding situation followed by a more in-depth description of various funding opportunities.Past workTo get an overview of AI safety spending, we first need to find out how much is spent on it per year. We can use past work as a prior and then use grant data to find a more accurate estimate.Changes in funding in the AI safety field (2017) by AI Impacts estimated the change in AI safety funding between 2014 - 2017. In 2017, the post estimated that total AI safety spending was about $9 million.How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues? (2020) by 80,000 Hours estimated the amount of money spent by EA on AI safety in 2019. Using data from the Open Philanthropy grants database, the post says that EA spent about $40 million on AI safety globally in 2019.In The Precipice (2020), Toby Ord estimated that between $10 million and $50 million was spent on reducing AI risk in 2020.2021 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison is an in-depth review of AI safety organizations and grantmakers and has a lot of relevant information.Overview of global AI safety fundingOne way to estimate total global spending on AI safety is to aggregate the total donations of major AI safety funds such as Open Philanthropy (Open Phil).It’s important to note that the [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XdhwXppfqrpPL2YDX/an-overview-of-the-ai-safety-funding-situation
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SummaryWe’re very excited to release some new research that Social Change Lab has been working on for a while. We teamed up with Apollo Academic Surveys to create an expert survey of academics who study social movements and protest. We surveyed 120 academics across Political Science, Sociology and other relevant disciplines, and picked many academics because we thought they had made significant contributions to the understanding of social movements and protest. We hope this survey provides some strategic insight that is useful for EAs working on a range of important issues. You can see the full results on the Apollo Academics Surveys website, but we wanted to share a few findings we found really interesting. We’ll also be releasing our own report (with greater analysis, interpretation and limitations) soon. However, in this short post we’ll cover some of the expert views on the following topics:Which are the most important strategic and organisational factors that lead to social movements succeedingThe most common reasons social movements fail to achieve their goalsThe effectiveness of disruptive protest based on what kind of issue you’re working on (e.g. high public support vs low public support)The effectiveness of disruptive protest within animal advocacy Some things we think are interesting from the full results but we excluded for brevity:The extent to which a social movement’s success is related to factors within their control (e.g. tactics and strategy) vs factors outside their control (e.g. wider political context)To what degree polarisation is inevitable or necessarily a bad outcomeWhat intermediate goals are important to focus on if you care about ultimately passing government policy. Additionally, you can click “See Additional Participant responses” to read what experts wrote to give additional context to their quantitative responses. ResultsImportant factors for social movement successOut of the factors we asked about, experts thought the most important tactical and strategic factor for a social movement’s success is “the strategic use of nonviolent disruptive tactics”. Overall, 69% of experts said this factor was either “very important” or “quite important”.Figure 1: Answers to Question 3 from the survey: “How important do you think the following tactical and strategic factors are in contributing to a social movement’s success? We were really struck by the contradiction between what the public (78% of people think that disruptive protests hinder the cause) and the media say about disruptive protests and what academics said. The experts who study social movements not only believe that strategic disruption can be an effective tactic, but that it is the most important tactical factor for a social movement's success (of the factors we asked about). This, and other relevant evidence, suggests we shouldn’t necessarily take people’s first reactions as the best indicator of effective protest. We include many more results on disruptive protest further down.Experts were also asked which factors of a social movement’s governance are the most important in driving success. The factor they rated most highly was 'the ability to mobilise and scale quickly in response to external events’. The factor they rated least important, possibly a surprise to activists themselves, was 'decentralised decision-making' Figure 2: [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iSemZYz5KyepYcksN/an-expert-survey-on-social-movements-and-protest-5
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TL;DR: Writing Contest for AI FablesDeadline: Sept 1Prizes: $1500/1000/500, consideration for writing retreatWord length: <6,000How: Google Doc in repliesPurpose: Help shape the future by helping people understand relevant issues.Hey everyone, I’d like to announce a writing competition to follow up on this post about AI Fables!Like Bard, I write fiction and think it has a lot of power not just to expand our imaginations beyond what we believe is possible, but also educate and inspire. For generations the idea of what Artificial General Intelligence could or would look like has been shaped by fiction, for better and for worse, and that will likely continue even as what once seemed to be purely speculative starts to become more and more real in our everyday lives.But there’s still time for good fiction to help shape the future, and on this particular topic, with the world changing so quickly, I want to help fill the empty spaces waiting for stories that can help people grapple with the relevant issues, and I’d like to help encourage those stories to be as good as possible, meaning both engaging and well-informed. To that end, I’m calling for submissions of short stories or story outlines that involve one or more of the “nuts and bolts” covered in the above post, as well as some of my own tweaks:Basics of AINeural networks are black boxes (though interpretability might help us to see inside).AI "Psychology"AI systems are alien in how they think. Even AGI are unlikely to think like humans or value things we'd take for granted they would.Orthogonality and instrumental convergence might provide insight into likely AI behaviour.AGI systems might be agents, in some relatively natural sense. They might also simulate agents, even if they are not agents.Potential dangers from AIOuter misalignment is a potential danger, but in the context of neural networks so too is inner misalignment (related: reward misspecification and goal misgeneralisation).Deceptive alignment might lead to worries about a treacherous turn.The possibility of recursive improvement might influence views about takeoff speed (which might influence views about safety).Broader Context of Potential RisksDifferent challenges might arise in the case of a singleton, when compared with multipolar scenarios.Arms races can lead to outcomes that no-one wants.AI rights could be a real thing, but also incorrect attribution of rights to non-sapient AI could itself pose a risk by restricting society’s ability to ensure safety.Psychology of Existential RiskCharacters whose perspectives and philosophies show what it's like to take X-risks seriously without being overwhelmed by existential dreadStories showing the social or cultural shifts that might be necessary to improve coordination and will to face X-risks....or are otherwise in some way related to unaligned AI or AGI risk, such that readers would be expected to better understand some aspect of the potential worlds we might end up in. Black Mirror is a good example of the “modern Aesop’s Fables or Grimm Fairytales” style of commentary-through-storytelling, but I’m particularly interested in stories that don’t moralize at readers, and rather help people understand and emotionally process issues related to AI.Though unrelated to AI, Truer Love's Kiss by Eliezer Yudkowsky and The Cambist [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gYxY5Mr2srBnrbuaT/announcing-the-ai-fables-writing-contest
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This is a linkpost for fatebook.ioAnnouncing Fatebook: a website that makes it extremely low friction to make and track predictions.It's designed to be very fast - just open a new tab, go to fatebook.io, type your prediction, and hit enter. Later, you'll get an email reminding you to resolve your question as YES, NO, or AMBIGUOUS.It's private by default, so you can track personal questions and give forecasts that you don't want to share publicly. You can also share questions with specific people, or publicly.Fatebook syncs with Fatebook for Slack - if you log in with the email you use for Slack, you’ll see all of your questions on the website.As you resolve your forecasts, you'll build a track record - Brier score, Relative Brier score, and see your calibration chart. You can use this to track the development of your forecasting skills.Some stories of outcomes I hope Fatebook will enableI hope people interested in EA use Fatebook to track many more of the predictions they’re making!Some example stories:During 1-1s at EAG, it’s common to pull out your phone and jot down predictions on Fatebook about cruxes of disagreementBefore you start projects, you and your team make your underlying assumptions explicit and put probabilities on them - then, as your plans make contact with reality, you update your estimatesAs part of your monthly review process, you might make forecasts about your goals and wellbeingIf you’re exploring career options and doing cheap tests like reading or interning, you first make predictions about what you’ll learn. Then you return to these periodically to reflect on how valuable more exploration might beIntro programs to EA (e.g. university reading groups, AGISF) and to rationality (e.g. ESPR, Atlas, Leaf) use Fatebook to make both on- and off-topic predictions. Participants get a chance to try forecasting on questions that are relevant to their interests and livesAs a result, I hope that we’ll reap some of the benefits of tracking predictions, e.g.:Truth-seeking incentives that reduce motivated reasoning => better decisionsProbabilities and concrete questions reduce talking past each other => clearer communicationTrack records help people improve their forecasting skills, and help identify people with excellent abilities (not just restricted to the domains that are typically covered on public platforms like Metaculus and Manifold like tech and geopolitics) => forecasting skill development and talent-spottingUltimately, the platform is pretty flexible - I’m interested to see what unexpected usecases people find for it, and what (if anything) actually seems useful about it in practice!Your feedback or thoughts would be very useful - we can chat in the comments here, in our Discord, or by email. You can try Fatebook at fatebook.ioThanks to the Atlas Fellowship for supporting this project, and thanks to everyone who's given feedback on earlier versions of the tool. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DWFRBzK3rAH3HFDZr/fatebook-the-fastest-way-to-make-and-track-predictions
Linkpost URL:
fatebook.io
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SummaryThis post explores the cost-effectiveness of AI safety field-building programs aimed at ML professionals, specifically the Trojan Detection Challenge (a prize), NeurIPS ML Safety Social, and NeurIPS ML Safety Workshop.We estimate the benefit of these programs in ‘Quality-Adjusted Research Years’, using cost-effectiveness models built for the Center for AI Safety (introduction post here, full code here).We intend for these models to support — not determine — strategic decisions. We do not believe, for instance, that programs which a model rates as lower cost-effectiveness are necessarily not worthwhile as part of a portfolio of programs.The models’ tentative results, summarized below, suggest that field-building programs for professionals compare favorably to ‘baseline’ programs — directly funding a talented research scientist or PhD student working on trojans research for 1 year or 5 years respectively. Further, the cost-effectiveness of these programs can be significantly improved with straightforward modifications — such as focusing a hypothetical prize on a more ‘relevant’ research avenue, or running a hypothetical workshop with a much smaller budget.ProgramCost (USD)Benefit (counterfactual expected QARYs)Cost-effectiveness (QARYs per $1M)Trojan Detection Challenge65,00026390NeurIPS ML Safety Social520015029,000NeurIPS ML Safety Workshop110,0003603300Hypothetical: Power Aversion Prize50,0004909900Hypothetical: Cheaper Workshop35,0002507000Baseline: Scientist Trojans500,000 84170Baseline: PhD Trojans250,0008.735For readers who are after high-level takeaways, including which factors are driving these results, skip ahead to the cost-effectiveness in context](LINK) section. For those keen on understanding the model and results in more detail, read on as we:Give important disclaimers. (Read more.)Direct you to background information about this project. (Read more.)Walk through the model. (Read more.)Contrast these programs with one another, and with funding researchers directly. (Read more.)Consider the scalability and robustness properties of the model. (Read more.)DisclaimerThis analysis is a starting point for discussion, not a final verdict. The most critical reasons for this are that:These models are reductionist. Even if we have avoided other pitfalls associated with cost-effectiveness analyses, the models might ignore factors that turn out to be crucial in practice, including (but not limited to) interactions between programs, threshold effects, and diffuse effects.The models’ assumptions are first-pass guesses, not truths set in stone. Most assumptions are imputed second-hand following a short moment of thought, before being adjusted ad-hoc for internal consistency and differences of beliefs between Center for AI Safety (CAIS) staff and external practitioners. In some cases, parameters have been redefined since initial practitioner input.Instead, the analyses in this post represent an initial effort in explicitly laying out assumptions, in order to take a more systematic approach towards AI safety field-building.BackgroundFor an introduction to our approach to modeling – including motivations for using models, the benefits and limitations of our key metric, guidance for adopting or adapting the models for your own work, comparisons between programs for students and professionals, and more – refer to the introduction post.2. The models’ default parameters are based on practitioner surveys and the expertise of CAIS staff. Detailed information on the values and definitions of these parameters, and comments on parameters with delicate definitions or contestable views, can be found in the parameter documentation sheet.The full code for this [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7kFPFYQSY7ZttoveS/cost-effectiveness-of-professional-field-building-programs
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SummaryThis post explores the cost-effectiveness of field-building programs for students, specifically the Atlas Fellowship (a rationality program, with some AI safety programming), MLSS (an ML safety course for undergraduates), a top-tier university student group, and undergraduate research stipends.We estimate the benefit of these programs in ‘Quality-Adjusted Research Years’, using cost-effectiveness models built for the Center for AI Safety (introduction post here, full code here). Since our framework focuses on benefits for technical AI safety research exclusively, we will not account for other benefits of programs with broader objectives, such as the Atlas Fellowship. We intend for these models to support — not determine — strategic decisions. We do not believe, for instance, that programs which a model rates as lower cost-effectiveness are necessarily not worthwhile as part of a portfolio of programs.The models’ tentative results, summarized below, suggest that student groups and undergraduate research stipends are considerably more cost-effective than Atlas and MLSS. (With many important caveats and uncertainties, discussed in the post.) Additionally, student groups and undergraduate research stipends compare favorably to ‘baseline’ programs — directly funding a talented research scientist or PhD student working on trojans research for 1 year or 5 years respectively.ProgramCost (USD) Benefit (counterfactual expected QARYs)Cost-effectiveness (QARYs per $1M)Atlas9,000,000 434.7MLSS330,0006.419Student Group350,00050140Undergraduate Stipends50,00017340Baseline: Scientist Trojans500,00084170Baseline: PhD Trojans250,0008.735For readers who are after high-level takeaways, including which factors are driving these results, skip ahead to the cost-effectiveness in context section. For those keen on understanding the model and results in more detail, read on as we:Give important disclaimers. (Read more.)Direct you to background information about this project. (Read more.)Walk through the model. (Read more.)Contrast these programs with one another, and with funding researchers directly. (Read more.)Test the robustness of the model. (Read more.)DisclaimersThis analysis is a starting point for discussion, not a final verdict. The most critical reasons for this are that:These models are reductionist. Even if we have avoided other pitfalls associated with cost-effectiveness analyses, the models might ignore factors that turn out to be crucial in practice, including (but not limited to) interactions between programs, threshold effects, and diffuse effects.The models’ assumptions are first-pass guesses, not truths set in stone. Most assumptions are imputed second-hand following a short moment of thought, before being adjusted ad-hoc for internal consistency and differences of beliefs between Center for AI Safety (CAIS) staff and external practitioners. In some cases, parameters have been redefined since initial practitioner input.This caveat is particularly important for the Atlas Fellowship, where we have not discussed parameter values with key organizers[1].Instead, the analyses in this post represent an initial effort in explicitly laying out assumptions, in order to take a more systematic approach towards AI safety field-building.BackgroundFor an introduction to our approach to modeling – including motivations for using models, the benefits and limitations of our key metric, guidance for adopting or adapting the models for your own work, comparisons between programs for students and professionals, and more – refer to the introduction post.The models’ default parameters are based on practitioner [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zYSAFtjasxsfm3nmh/cost-effectiveness-of-student-programs-for-ai-safety
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SummaryAI safety field-building is a large space, with many possible programs. The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) has commissioned cost-effectiveness models to support decisions regarding how to prioritize between these programs.This analysis is a starting point for discussion, not a final verdict. Numbers should not be taken out of context and are not necessarily endorsed fully by CAIS. Rather, we believe that these models:Provide a framework for modeling the effectiveness of field-building programs.Make explicit underlying assumptions which then can be the focal point of further discussions.Provide one perspective (and by no means the only perspective) on the cost-effectiveness of different programs.These models have so far assisted our evaluations of field-building programs for students and professionals, detailed here and here respectively.This post:Provides motivations for using explicit models. (Read more.)Details the metric used in the model to evaluate field-building programs. (Read more.)Guides you on adopting or adapting the models for your own work. (Read more.)Teases tentative results, and analyzes an important crux: one’s preference for current versus future research. (Read more.)Motivations for explicit modelsWe expect that many readers of this post will already be on-board with the practice of using explicit models to guide decision-making — historically, cost-effectiveness analyses have been core to effective altruism. At the same time, however, we expect that few do this in practice, in part because evaluating the cost-effectiveness of AI safety programs might be more challenging than evaluating global development or animal welfare programs. This section justifies our belief that using explicit models for AI safety is worthwhile in practice. We see two core benefits:Enhanced strategic decision-making, for CAIS as well as other organizations.Improved communication between organizations.When making strategic decisions, we are often interested in questions such as:What assumptions does our view on the impact of program X depend on?Which information is most important for us to learn about program X?At what scale should we operate program X?How should we make allocation decisions between programs?The first benefit — enhanced strategic decision-making — is realized if models help us to reason through questions like these.The second benefit of using explicit models — improved communication between organizations — is realized if models help illuminate disagreements' cruxes and their significance. See the analysis of preferences for current versus future research later in this post for an example of this benefit in action.Of course, explicit models are not without limitations. Models might not answer the right questions, contain conceptual or implementation errors, or risk their outputs being taken too literally. Most importantly, explicit models are inherently reductionist, ignoring factors that might be crucial in practice, including (but not limited to) interactions between programs, threshold effects, diffuse effects, and learning benefits. That said, we believe that explicit models can be quite useful to the AI safety field if we keep these limitations in mind.What we model: QARYsDefinitionsOur key metric is the Quality-Adjusted Research Year (QARY). We define a QARY as:A year of research labor (40 hours * 50 weeks),Conducted by a research scientist (other researcher types will be inflated or deflated),Of average ability [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ykqh8ku7NHN9CGkdC/modeling-the-impact-of-ai-safety-field-building-programs
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This is a linkpost for "Forecasting Existential Risks: Evidence from a Long-Run Forecasting Tournament," accessible here: https://forecastingresearch.org/s/XPT.pdfToday, the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) released "Forecasting Existential Risks: Evidence from a Long-Run Forecasting Tournament", which describes the results of the Existential-Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT).The XPT, which ran from June through October of 2022, brought together forecasters from two groups with distinctive claims to knowledge about humanity’s future — experts in various domains relevant to existential risk, and "superforecasters" with a track record of predictive accuracy over short time horizons. We asked tournament participants to predict the likelihood of global risks related to nuclear weapon use, biorisks, and AI, along with dozens of other related, shorter-run forecasts.Some major takeaways from the XPT include:The median domain expert predicted a 20% chance of catastrophe and a 6% chance of human extinction by 2100. The median superforecaster predicted a 9% chance of catastrophe and a 1% chance of extinction. Superforecasters predicted considerably lower chances of both catastrophe and extinction than did experts, but the disagreement between experts and superforecasters was not uniform across topics. Experts and superforecasters were furthest apart (in percentage point terms) on AI risk, and most similar on the risk of nuclear war.Predictions about risk were highly correlated across topics. For example, participants who gave higher risk estimates for AI also gave (on average) higher risk estimates for biorisks and nuclear weapon use.Forecasters with higher “intersubjective accuracy”—i.e., those best at predicting the views of other participants—estimated lower probabilities of catastrophic and extinction risks from all sources.Few minds were changed during the XPT, even among the most active participants, and despite monetary incentives for persuading others.See the full working paper here.FRI hopes that the XPT will not only inform our understanding of existential risks, but will also advance the science of forecasting by:Collecting a large set of forecasts resolving on a long timescale, in a rigorous setting. This will allow us to measure correlations between short-run (2024), medium-run (2030) and longer-run (2050) accuracy in the coming decades.Exploring the use of bonus payments for participants who both 1) produced persuasive rationales and 2) made accurate “intersubjective” forecasts (i.e., predictions of the predictions of other participants), which we are testing as early indicators of the reliability of long-range forecasts.Encouraging experts and superforecasters to interact: to share knowledge, debate, and attempt to persuade each other. We plan to explore the value of these interactions in future work.As a follow-up to our report release, we are producing a series of posts on the EA Forum that will cover the XPT's findings on:AI risk (in 6 posts):OverviewDetails on AI riskDetails on AI timelinesXPT forecasts on some key AI inputs from Ajeya Cotra's biological anchors reportXPT forecasts on some key AI inputs from Epoch's direct approach modelConsensus on the expected shape of development of AI progressOverview of findings on biorisk (1 post)Overview of findings on nuclear risk (1 post)Overview of findings from miscellaneous forecasting questions (1 post)FRI's planned next steps for this research agenda, along with a request for input on what FRI should do next (1 post) Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/un42vaZgyX7ch2kaj/announcing-forecasting-existential-risks-evidence-from-a
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This paper is about (1) "government intervention" to protect "against the risks from frontier AI models" and (2) some particular proposed safety standards. It's by Markus Anderljung, Joslyn Barnhart (Google DeepMind), Jade Leung (OpenAI governance lead), Anton Korinek, Cullen O'Keefe (OpenAI), Jess Whittlestone, and 18 others.AbstractAdvanced AI models hold the promise of tremendous benefits for humanity, but society needs to proactively manage the accompanying risks. In this paper, we focus on what we term “frontier AI” models — highly capable foundation models that could possess dangerous capabilities sufficient to pose severe risks to public safety. Frontier AI models pose a distinct regulatory challenge: dangerous capabilities can arise unexpectedly; it is difficult to robustly prevent a deployed model from being misused; and, it is difficult to stop a model’s capabilities from proliferating broadly. To address these challenges, at least three building blocks for the regulation of frontier models are needed: (1) standard-setting processes to identify appropriate requirements for frontier AI developers, (2) registration and reporting requirements to provide regulators with visibility into frontier AI development processes, and (3) mechanisms to ensure compliance with safety standards for the development and deployment of frontier AI models. Industry self-regulation is an important first step. However, wider societal discussions and government intervention will be needed to create standards and to ensure compliance with them. We consider several options to this end, including granting enforcement powers to supervisory authorities and licensure regimes for frontier AI models. Finally, we propose an initial set of safety standards. These include conducting pre-deployment risk assessments; external scrutiny of model behavior; using risk assessments to inform deployment decisions; and monitoring and responding to new information about model capabilities and uses post-deployment. We hope this discussion contributes to the broader conversation on how to balance public safety risks and innovation benefits from advances at the frontier of AI development.Executive SummaryThe capabilities of today’s foundation models highlight both the promise and risks of rapid advances in AI. These models have demonstrated significant potential to benefit people in a wide range of fields, including education, medicine, and scientific research. At the same time, the risks posed by present-day models, coupled with forecasts of future AI progress, have rightfully stimulated calls for increased oversight and governance of AI across a range of policy issues. We focus on one such issue: the possibility that, as capabilities continue to advance, new foundation models could pose severe risks to public safety, be it via misuse or accident. Although there is ongoing debate about the nature and scope of these risks, we expect that government involvement will be required to ensure that such "frontier AI models” are harnessed in the public interest.Three factors suggest that frontier AI development may be in need of targeted regulation: (1) Models may possess unexpected and difficult-to-detect dangerous capabilities; (2) Models deployed for broad use can be difficult to reliably control and to prevent from being used to cause harm; (3) Models may proliferate rapidly, enabling circumvention of safeguards.Self-regulation is unlikely to provide sufficient [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/y4HpooqutBswgyWRB/frontier-ai-regulation
Linkpost URL:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.03718.pdf
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Summary: Some values are less adapted to the “biggest potential futures”[1] than others (see my previous post), in the sense that they may constrain how one should go about colonizing space, making them less competitive in a space-expansion race. The preference for reducing suffering is one example of a preference that seems particularly likely to be unadapted and selected against. It forces the suffering-concerned agents to make trade-offs between preventing suffering and increasing their ability to create more of what they value. Meanwhile, those who don’t care about suffering don’t face this trade-off and can focus on optimizing for what they value without worrying about the suffering they might (in)directly cause. Therefore, we should – all else equal – expect the “grabbiest” civilizations/agents to have relatively low levels of concern for suffering, including humanity (if it becomes grabby). Call this the Upside-focused Colonist Curse (UCC). In this post, I explain this UCC dynamic in more detail using an example. Then, I argue that the more significant this dynamic is (relative to competing others), the more we should prioritize s-risks over other long-term risks, and soon.The humane values, the positive utilitarians, and the disvalue penaltyConsider the concept of disvalue penalty: the (subjective) amount of disvalue a given agent would have to be responsible for in order to bring about the highest (subjective) amount of value they can. The story below should make what it means more intuitive.Say they are only two types of agents:those endorsing “humane values” (the HVs) who disvalue suffering and value things like pleasure;the “positive utilitarians” (the PUs) who value things like pleasure but disvalue nothing.These two groups are in competition to control their shared planet, or solar system, or light cone, or whatever. The HVs estimate that they could colonize a maximum of [some high number] of stars and fill those with a maximum of [some high number] units of value. However, they also know that increasing their civilization’s ability to create value also increases s-risks (in absolute).[2] They, therefore, face a trade-off between maximizing value and preventing suffering which incentivizes them to be cautious with regard to how they colonize space. If they were to purely optimize for more value without watching for the suffering they might (directly or indirectly) become responsible for, they’d predict they would cause x unit of suffering for every 10 units of value they create.[3] This is the HVs’ disvalue penalty: x/10 (which is a ratio; a high ratio means a heavy penalty). The PUs, however, do not care about the suffering they might be responsible for. They don’t face the trade-off the HVs face and have no incentive to be cautious like them. They can – right away – start colonizing as many stars as possible to eventually fill them with value, without worrying about anything else. The PU’s disvalue penalty is 0.Image 1: Niander Wallace, a character from Blade Runner 2049 who can be thought of as a particularly baddy PU.[4]Because they have a higher disvalue penalty (incentivizing them to be more cautious), the humane values are less “grabby” than those of the PUs. [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bTPP7fZxSvBzsNDES/why-we-may-expect-our-successors-not-to-care-about-suffering-2
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You can now apply to Charity Entrepreneurship’s 2024 Incubation Programs! This is the 5th year of running our Incubation Program. With 27 charities started, $2.47M in seed grants disbursed, and a number of our charities being recognized as potentially 20 to even 60 times more cost-effective than top GiveWell charities, we invite you to join our community of high-impact nonprofits by applying to our two upcoming programs: February-March 2024, with a focus on farmed animals and global health and development mass media interventions.August-September 2024 with a focus on the top most cost-effective Sustainable Development Goals (as identified by Copenhagen Consensus) as well as organophosphate pesticides and other neurotoxicants (as identified by a CE Incubation Program graduate). [APPLY NOW]Please submit your applications by September 30, 2023!Details about the program can be found on our website: https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/incubation-programWe invite people from all backgrounds, ages, and nationalities to apply. We are not looking for any specific type of work experience or formal education; we’re looking for potential. What our incubatees have in common is…A deep dedication to doing goodAmbition to make rapid progress and achieve resultsThe drive to always keep learningThe grit and creativity to keep going even in the face of difficultiesDiverse and complementary skill setsWe recommend that you watch our video with the participants of our February-March 2023 Incubation Program if you want to learn more about why past incubatees joined the program and what their experience was like.Announcing our top intervention ideas in mass mediaFor our upcoming February-March 2024 Incubation Program, we looked into mass media interventions in the area of global health and development. Our research focused on social and behaviour change communication campaigns delivered through radio advertising, TV shows, text messages and similar with the goal of improving human well-being. After going through our iterative research process, we have found two highly promising intervention ideas for new charities to start: 1. Childhood vaccination reminders A simple SMS or call reminder can be all a caregiver needs to attend a child’s vaccination appointment. CE-incubated Suvita is delivering this impactful service at scale in India, and a new non-profit organization will launch it in the next top-priority country. This org will likely coordinate closely with Suvita to expand to numerous priority countries in the future or could even operate under the same umbrella. 2. Entertainment-led mass media to prevent violence against womenIntimate partner violence affects millions of women, with wide-ranging health and financial consequences. A new non-profit organization can prevent this violence from ever happening by changing behaviors through edutainment mass media content. During the program, we will supply 80+ hour research and implementation reports on all top ideas to help participants find the their best fit and make it easy for our graduates to hit the ground running.We will announce our top intervention ideas in the space of preventive animal welfare in our next post and provide you with longer write-ups of the mass media interventions. Keep an eye out on the forum, or subscribe to our newsletter.Should you apply?We hope that nonprofit entrepreneurship is already on your radar as a potential career. It’s an unconventional career [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AfXC5CDtSKezpiyf6/ce-incubation-programs-2024-applications-are-now-open-our
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We are excited to announce that Basefund has entered its trial phase. Starting today, individuals who have previously donated to effective charities and are currently facing financial trouble can apply for hardship assistance at basefund.org. During this trial phase, if your application is accepted, you will receive the lowest amount among the following three options:
The payout suggested by our hardship examiners 50% of your donations to cost-effective charities made in 2022 and 2023 1,000 USD or the equivalent amount in another currency
Beware that during the trial phase, Basefund may halt operations or change its rules without warning. If you're aware of anyone who has previously donated to effective charities and is currently facing financial hardship, please let them know about our fund. If you're not quite sure whether you qualify as experiencing hardship, we recommend you to submit an application.
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4TJpwmGmdgv7R6nGZ/basefund-has-entered-its-trial-phase-1
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IntroductionImpact Academy is a new field-building and educational institution seeking to enable people to become world-class leaders, thinkers, and doers, using their careers and character to solve the world’s most pressing problems and create the best possible future. Impact Academy was founded by Vilhelm Skoglund, Sebastian Schmidt, and Lowe Lundin. We have already secured significant funding to set up the organization and carry out ambitious projects in 2023 and beyond. Please read this document for more about Impact Academy, our Theory of Change, and our two upcoming projects. The purpose of this document is to provide an extensive evaluation and reflection on Future Academy - our first program (and experiment). Future Academy aimed to equip university students and early-career professionals worldwide with the thinking, skills, and resources they need to pursue ambitious and impactful careers. It was a free six-month program consisting of four in-person weekends with workshops, presentations, socials, and monthly digital events. Furthermore, the 21 fellows worked on an impact project with an experienced mentor and received professional coaching to empower them to increase their impact and become their best selves. Upon completion of the program, all participants went to a global impact conference (EAGx Nordics) where four fellows presented their projects. We awarded stipends of a total of $20,000 to the best projects. The projects included a sentiment analysis of public perception of AI risk, a philosophy AI alignment paper, and an organization idea for improving research talent in Tanzania. Our faculty included entrepreneurs and professors from Oxford University and UC Berkeley.Note that this document attempts to assess to what extent we’ve served the world. This involves an assessment of the wonderful fellows who participated in Future Academy, and our ability to help them. This is not meant as an evaluation of peoples’ worth nor a definite score of general abilities, but an evaluation of our ability to help. We hope we do not offend anyone and have tried our best not to do so, but if you think we write anything inappropriate, please let us know in the comments or by reaching out to sebastian [at] impactacademy.org.Main results and successesWe confirmed a key hypothesis underlying Future Academy - namely that we can attract promising and talented people who i) have no to moderate knowledge of Effective Altruism and longtermism, ii) are coming from underserved regions (e.g., 40% came from Southern and Eastern Europe), and are more diverse (e.g., 56% were female).We created a bespoke primary metric called counterfactual expected career contribution (CECC) inspired by 80,000 hours’ IASPC metric and Centre for Effective Altruism’s HEA metric. We think the total score was 22.8, and ~ four fellows made up the majority of that score.To give an understanding of the CECC metric, we’ll give an example. Take an imaginary fellow, Alice. Before the intervention, based on our surveys and initial interactions, we expected that she may have an impactful career, but that she is unlikely to pursue a priority path based on IA principles. We rate her Expected Career Contribution (ECC) to be 2. After the [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SFyCrtdfuYjtPq6xs/future-academy-successes-challenges-and-recommendations-to
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IntroductionLast year, one conversation left a lasting impression on me. A friend remarked on the challenges of navigating "corrupting forces" in the Bay Area. Intrigued by this statement, I decided to investigate the state of affairs in the Bay if I had the chance. So when I got the opportunity to visit Berkeley in February 2023, I prepared a set of interview questions. Can you share an experience where you had difficulty voicing your opinion? What topics are hard to clearly think about due to social pressures and factors related to your EA community or EA in general? Is there anything about your EA community that makes you feel alienated? What is your attitude towards dominant narratives in Berkeley? [1] In the end, I formally interviewed fewer than ten people and had more casual conversations about these topics with around 30 people. Most people were involved in AI alignment to some extent. The content for this collection of vignettes draws from the experience of around ten people. [2] I chose the content for the vignettes for one of two reasons – potential representativity and potential extraordinariness. I hypothesized that some experiences represent the wider EA Berkeley community accurately. Others, I included because they surprised me, and I wanted to find out how common they are. All individuals gave me their consent to post the vignettes in their current form. How did I arrive at these vignettes? It was a four-step process. First, I conducted the interviews while jotting down notes. For the more casual conversations, I took notes afterwards. The second step involved transcribing these notes into write-ups. After that, I obscured any identifying details to ensure the anonymity of the interviewees. Lastly, I converted the write-ups into vignettes by condensing them into narratives and honing in on key points while trying to retain the essence of what was said.I tried to reduce artistic liberties by asking participants to give feedback on how close the vignettes were to the spirit of what they meant (or think they meant at the time). It is worth noting that I bridged some gaps with my own interpretations of the conversations, relying on the participants to point out inaccuracies. By doing that, I might have anchored their responses. Moreover, people provided different levels of feedback. Some shared thorough, detailed reviews pointing out many imprecisions and misconceptions. Sometimes, that process spanned multiple feedback cycles. Other participants gave minimal commentary.Because I am publishing the vignettes months after the conversations and interviews, I want to include how attitudes have changed in the intervening period. I generalised the attitudes into the following categories:Withdrawn endorsement (Status: The interviewee endorsed the following content during the interview but no longer endorses it at the time of publication.)Weakened endorsement (Status: The interviewee has weakened their endorsement of the following content since the interview.)Unchanged endorsement (Status: The interviewee maintains their endorsement of the following content, which has remained unchanged since the interview.)Strengthened endorsement (Status: The interviewee has strengthened their endorsement of the following content since the interview.)I clustered the vignettes according [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WxqyXbyQiEjiAsoJr/the-seeker-s-game-vignettes-from-the-bay
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Linkpost URL:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yXLEcd9eixWucKGHg/the-seeker-s-game-vignettes-from-the-bay
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After reading this post, I found myself puzzling over the following question: why is Tetlock-style judgmental forecasting so popular within EA, but not that popular outside of it?From what I know about forecasting (admittedly not much), these techniques should be applicable to a wide range of cases, and so they should be valuable to many actors. Financial institutions, the corporate sector in general, media outlets, governments, think tanks, and non-EA philanthropists all seem to face a large number of questions which could get better answers through this type of forecasting. In practice, however, forecasting is not that popular among these actors, and I couldn't think of/find a good reason why.[1]The most relevant piece on the topic that I could find was Prediction Markets in The Corporate Setting. As the title suggests, it focuses on prediction markets (whose lack of success is similarly intriguing), but it also discusses forecasting tournaments to some extent. Although it does a great job at highlighting some important applicability issues for judgmental forecasting and prediction markets, it doesn't explain why these tools would be particularly useful for EAs. None of the reasons there would explain the fact that financial institutions don't seem to be making widespread use of forecasting to get better answers to particularly decision-relevant questions, either internally or through consultancies like Good Judgment.Answers to this question could be that this type of forecasting is:Useful for EA, but not (much) for other actors. This solution has some support if we think that EAs and non-EAs are efficiently pursuing their goals. If this is true, then it suggests that EAs should continue supporting research on forecasting and development of forecasting platforms, but should perhaps focus less on getting other actors to use it.[2] My best guess is that this is not true in general, though it is more likely to be true for some domains, such as long-run forecasting.Useful for EA and other actors. I think that this is the most likely solution to my question. However, as mentioned above, I don't have a good explanation for the situation that we observe in the world right now. Such an explanation could point us to what are the key bottlenecks for widespread adoption. Trying to overcome those bottlenecks might be a great opportunity for EA, as it might (among other benefits) substantially increase forecasting R&D.Not useful. This is the most unlikely solution, but is still worth considering. Assessing the counterfactual value of forecasting for EA decisionmaking seems hard, and it could be the case that the decisions we would make without using this type of forecasting would be as good as (or maybe even better than) those we currently obtain.It could be that I'm missing something obvious here, and if so, please let me know! Otherwise, I don't know if anyone has a good answer to this question, but I'd also really appreciate pieces of evidence that support/oppose any of the potential answers outlined above. For example, I would expect that by this point we have a number [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hRoyBc6aCyrvQ9g3p/why-is-ea-so-enthusiastic-about-forecasting
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This is a tough one to post, it’s also a little off topic for the forum. I went back and forth a great deal about whether to crosspost it anyway, and ultimately decided to, since I have in some ways posted on this topic here before, and since there are several parts that are directly relevant to Effective Altruism (the last three sections all have substantial relevance of some sort). Doing this also makes it easier for this to be relatively public, and so to get some difficult conversations over with. The short version of it is that I’ve been an alcoholic, mostly in secret, for about three years now. This blogpost is a lengthy dive into different observations about it, and ways it has changed my mind on various issues. I don’t want to post the whole thing below because, well, frankly it’s huge and only occasionally relevant, so instead I’m going to post some relevant quotes as people often do with linkposts of things they didn’t write. There’s a good deal more in the link.
First, here’s a quick summary of how things got started:
“I started drinking during early 2020, when as far as I can tell there was no special drama going on with Effective Altruism, and I had already been involved with it in a similar capacity for a couple years. Most of the alcoholics I’ve met at this point either got started or got significantly worse during the pandemic, I was no different.
But the truth is my drinking even then wasn’t terribly dramatic a coping mechanism. There was never anything that meaningfully ‘drove me to drink’. The idea that drinking at this point could land me here wasn’t part of my decision at all, I was just kind of bored and lonely and decided it would be a fun treat to drink a beer or two at night – something I had very rarely done before.
As the pandemic wore on, it became something I looked forward to more and more, and eventually I discovered the appeal of hard liquor, which I never switched back from, and eventually I started working on my thesis for my first MA. The combination of my thesis and hard liquor turned a casual habit and minor coping mechanism into something more obviously hard for me to let go of. Over the course of the next three years things got slowly worse from there, and I came to realize more and more how little control I had.
It wasn’t some meaningful part of the larger story of my life, replete with a buried darkness in my soul coming to the forefront, or a unique challenge driven by terrible circumstances. I have had to push back in therapy repeatedly on these subtler and more interesting attempts to make something of the event. The truth is sober reflection makes it all look like little more than a meaningless tragedy.”
Here are some reflections on what [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/F2MfbmRAiMx2PDhaD/some-observations-on-alcoholism
Linkpost URL:
https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/alcoholism/
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Co-authored with Amanda MetskasThis is a linkpost from ClearerThinking.org. We've included some excerpts of the article below, but you can read the full post here.Chances are, your life has been impacted by anxiety disorders or depression, either through your direct experience or through the impact they have had on your loved ones. Anxiety and depression are the two most common mental health conditions in the world, but they are frequently misunderstood. Previous EA Mental Health surveys (2023, 2021, and 2018) have also highlighted the importance of these topics to people in the community who take the surveys. In this data-based essay, we aim to help you better understand anxiety and depression, as well as the hidden links between them. By improving your understanding of these disorders, you may find it easier to recognize anxiety and depression in yourself and be more effective at supporting people in your life who experience these conditions. This infographic summarizes some of our interesting findings about the differences and similarities between anxiety and depression (click here to see the infographic at full size).The scale of both anxiety and depression is vast: the World Health Organization estimates that 301 million people worldwide suffer from an anxiety disorder, and 280 million people worldwide suffer from depression. Worldwide, depression ranks as the second largest cause of disability, and anxiety ranks eighth, according to analyses of the most recent Global Burden of Disease study. And yet, despite their prevalence and severe impacts, humanity’s scientific understanding has a substantial way to go to fully understand and highly reliably treat these conditions. Improved treatment and management techniques could make a huge difference in the quality of life of hundreds of millions of people around the world. These astounding statistics have motivated us to run our own studies investigating how these conditions work and how they relate to each other. This article will explain what we found!Overlapping Disorders A major obstacle to understanding anxiety and depression is that they often go together - many people who experience one also experience the other. Approximately 45% of people who experience a depressive disorder in their lifetime also experience an anxiety disorder, and these often occur during the same timeframe. Among people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, about 43% of them will also experience depression in their lifetime. In one of our own studies, we found that commonly used measures of anxiety and depression (the GAD7 and PHQ9 scales) had shockingly high correlations (r=0.82). These strong links between anxiety and depression can make it more difficult to disentangle how each of these disorders works and make it more difficult for a person with anxiety and depression to effectively manage their conditions. Some people even think they have an anxiety disorder when it's more accurate to say they have a depressive disorder or the reverse. The co-occurrence of anxiety and depression is a bit puzzling because they almost seem like opposites when experienced in the moment. A high level of anxiety often feels like being “wound up” – muscle tension, rapid [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GqtgiLgGmFpTc22NW/understanding-the-two-most-common-mental-health-problems-in
Linkpost URL:
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/understanding-the-two-most-common-mental-health-problems-in-the-world
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We're pleased to announce the first Existential InfoSec Forum, a half-day event aimed at strengthening the infosec community and pursuing important ways to reduce the risk of an existential catastrophe. The forum will feature talks from infosec leaders across AI labs, policy and research, small group discussions and interactive workshops on real-world infosec challenges.This event will significantly emphasise AI as it coincides with a big push at Defcon for AI model red-teaming. We think this is an exciting opportunity to share insights and updates from a rapidly developing space — both for those working in infosec in priority areas for existential risk reduction and those newer to the field.Event DetailsDate: 10 August 2023Time: 2 pm – 8 pm PDT, including dinnerLocation: Las VegasThe conference will take place just before DEFCON 31 and will be a short walk from the main DEFCON venue (though the event is not affiliated with DEFCON). Wim van der Schoot is running the event with support from EA Funds and the Partner Events team at CEA.Why Attend?The forum is designed to:Facilitate knowledge transfer among attendees, improve understanding of the existential infosec landscape, and develop professional skills.Connect attendees to active infosec practitioners working on existential risk for feedback, identify potential job opportunities, and foster mentorship relationships.Enhance situational awareness of attendees to help them make more informed decisions and identify ecosystem gaps and opportunities.Mitigate risks associated with transitioning to direct work in infosec through a supportive network, which can help identify job opportunities.Who Should Attend?People already engaged in infosec within high-priority areas for existential risk reduction.Infosec professionals interested in transitioning into priority areas for existential risk reduction.Policy professionals, members of the national security community, and others working on regulating AI who would benefit from connecting with x-risk-conscious infosec practitioners.Software engineers (or others with a strong background for skilling up in infosec) who are interested in working in a high-priority infosec role for existential risk reduction in the next two years.Tentative Event Schedule2 pm – 3:30 pm: Keynote talks (speakers include Jason Clinton, Anthropic CISO, and others from frontier labs, government agencies, think tanks and researchers)3:30 pm – 4:30 pm: Networking break4:30 pm – 6 pm: Breakout sessions/workshops, e.g. AI infosec policy, AI cybersecurity capabilities and evaluations, how to defend against nation-states, and building a career in infosec.6 pm – 7 pm: Drinks reception7 pm – 8:30 pm: Closing dinnerPlease complete this form before 20 July to register your interest in attending. Note that we can only invite some people who register due to capacity limitations, but early registration will increase your chances of receiving an invitation. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dqpR2E4Bw9KEEaWoK/announcing-the-existential-infosec-forum
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Author: Miranda Kaplan, GiveWell Communications Associate For many people, GiveWell is practically synonymous with our short list of top charities. But the amount of money we've sent to other organizations, doing other important work, has been increasing. In 2021, we made or recommended about $190 million in grants to non–top charity programs, like water treatment and malnutrition treatment, and in 2022, we set up the All Grants Fund specifically so donors could contribute to programs in this category.
Source: GiveWell, GiveWell Metrics Report — 2021 Annual Review, p. 9 We want to use this blog to give you more frequent, brief insights into these newer areas of our grantmaking before we publish our formal grant write-ups. Below we'll discuss, in light detail, a program that's well outside of our traditional wheelhouse, but that we think significantly improves children's lives—treatment for clubfoot with an organization called MiracleFeet. The grant Clubfoot is a congenital (i.e., present from birth) abnormality that causes one or both feet to twist inward and upward. Children born with clubfoot must walk on the sides or backs of their feet, which leads to pain, severely limited mobility, and, reportedly, social stigma. If not corrected, clubfoot is a lifelong condition.[1] In January 2023, we recommended a $5.2 million grant to MiracleFeet to expand its existing clubfoot treatment program in the Philippines and launch two new programs in Chad and Côte d'Ivoire.[2] In the countries where it works, MiracleFeet and its local NGO partners help health facilities diagnose and treat clubfoot, using a process called the Ponseti method. This generally requires placing the affected foot in a series of casts, performing a minor surgical procedure to improve the foot's flexibility, and bracing the foot during sleep for up to five years.[3] MiracleFeet and its partners provide supplies for casting and bracing, train government health care workers in the above procedures, build awareness of clubfoot, and help health systems collect data on treatment.[4] This makes it comparable to a "technical assistance" program: MiracleFeet doesn't perform clubfoot treatment itself; instead, along with its partners, it helps set health facilities up to successfully find and treat clubfoot cases themselves.
The brace and custom shoes supplied by MiracleFeet for clubfoot treatment. Photograph courtesy of MiracleFeet. We were excited to recommend this grant because we think it will probably result in a lot more kids being treated for a serious, lifelong condition that nevertheless appears neglected. Clubfoot is debilitating but not life-threatening, and affects only about 1 in 800 babies born.[5] In resource-strapped countries, a relatively new and involved treatment like the Ponseti method may not be prioritized unless an NGO like MiracleFeet is there to advocate for and assist with it.[6] We estimate that MiracleFeet will support treatment of about 10,000 children with this grant, and that only about 10% of those children would get treated absent MiracleFeet,[7] though we don't feel very certain about this (more below, under "What we're still learning"). All in all, after adjustments, we think that this grant will [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hijgHeBaYZMwo6XEg/why-we-re-funding-clubfoot-treatment-through-miraclefeet
Linkpost URL:
https://blog.givewell.org/2023/07/07/miraclefeet-clubfoot-treatment-grant
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I've seen some good posts lately about veganism and health. Here's my two cents. I'm convinced by the arguments that many animals might have conscious experiences. I'd prefer not to torture the ones that do. Unfortunately, if I adopted a fully vegan lifestyle I might well be hospitalized for malnutrition within the year. In this post I'll give an overview of how I balance nutrition, ethics, and allergy constraints, and solicit ideas for improvement.My problemI am demonstrably allergic to a startling variety of foods, including, but not limited to:PeasCeleryUncooked egg yolksChickpeas (and derivatives like hummus)Beans (but not peanuts, which are also legumes)Not deathly allergic, but definitely my-afternoon-is-ruined allergic. A tablespoon of hummus can give me 2-4 hours of intensely distracting pain. I have also experienced an identical, though sometimes inconsistent, reaction to:FishSoylentShellfishEggplantSweet potato Cranberry sauceButternut squashEvery protein shake mix I have ever triedSeveral mixtures containing none of the above but some hard-to-isolate combination of ingredientsYou will notice that several of the items on the above lists are widely considered key sources of vital nutrients in a vegetarian or vegan diet.Coupled with my strong dislike of spicy food, a typical restaurant menu typically contains at most 1-5 entrees I can safely eat. Catered meals often hedge me out entirely. At one (non-EA) event, after listing my allergies in the RSVP, I was served a dinner plate consisting of fish, lima beans, and rice pilaf with peas and celery. [1]Even with these honestly ridiculous constraints, I've found some cheap ways to reduce my dependence on harmfully-produced meat. Reducing harm in an omnivorous dietIt's easier to cut the first half of my meat intake than the second half. Diminishing returns apply. By the same logic, two people eating half as much meat is just as good as one person eating none. Here are some things I've learned while trying to minimize the suffering my diet imposes:Tofu is a fine supplement in many dishes, and rice is a cheap and flexible staple. Green vegetables like spinach and broccoli make good additions to any diet.Nuts and many dried fruits are nutrient-rich. Also, peanuts and cashews add a nice crunchy texture to homemade rice dishes. I can also eat cooked eggs, and I've heard some convincing arguments in favor of eggs being less harmful than chicken.[2]I'm distrustful of "cruelty-free" branding because so many standards for that kind of thing are false or misleading, but with further research I expect I could find more harm-minimizing options there too.Being allergic to fish really hurts, because I think fish probably suffer less than birds or mammals, if at all. If I could eat more fish instead of meat, I would. I could probably bring myself to eat insect-based protein if it were a) actually available where I live and b) not recognizably still a whole bug at the time. Still working on that angle. I'm tentatively excited about lab-grown meat.My wife and I did some math and determined we aren't getting enough protein in our diets, so we're stepping up meat intake overall, but it's still a significant [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ubXnfYihRtvg59Nk2/even-an-obligate-omnivore-can-try-to-eat-less-meat
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This post was inspired by a phone call I made a few days ago to my mother where I informed her I was turning vegetarian - I knew it would be rough but it turned out significantly worse than I expected still. The phone call quickly turned sour as she believed I was making a grave mistake and that I was being unjust. This was not unique - I talked to two other individuals raised in East Asian households which elicited similar if not stronger responses. One friend told me that coming out vegan elicited a stronger response than coming out as gay.Effective Altruism's moral roots are weird. Really weird to those raised on a western ethical system and absurdly weird to those raised on an eastern ethical system.This is because following the virtues of effective altruism can often lead to conflict within Eastern ethical systems. Being virtuous requires us to stick to a moral code, even if that means clashing with personal relationships. Otherwise, virtue would demand that we keep doing things that aren't morally right just to keep the peace in our circles. This dilemma can be difficult for everyone, but it's particularly challenging for those of us brought up in Asian households.Take my mother's moral compass, for instance. It closely reflects the Chinese ethos, which in turn is heavily influenced by Confucian principles. In the Confucian view of virtue, the focus is on fulfilling one's duties within a socially hierarchical and communal framework. This is articulated through key concepts such as "ren" or benevolence, often expressed through the cultural concept of "mianzi" or face, which is deeply embedded in social relationships. A core expectation within the family is to fulfill one's duties, especially towards one's parents.In the eyes of Confucian virtue, my vegetarianism disrupts this order. The sharing of food, often including meat, is a significant social ritual in Chinese culture, promoting family cohesion. My deviation from this norm is seen as a violation of the principle of "Li", disrupting harmony and causing displeasure at the family table. My mother’s emotionally charged conversations with me reflects this deep-rooted cultural clash.In many Asian cultures, there are two important ideas. The first is "guanxi," or the idea that everyone is connected and relies on each other. The second are the unbreakable responsibilities to your parents, called "filial piety." These ideas are a big part of the way people think and act in these cultures, and they create a complicated set of rules and expectations for how people should behave.This can make it hard for someone to do something different, because it might upset this delicate balance. Often, what's seen as most important is what's best for the family or community, even if it means sacrificing your own personal beliefs.So, for someone from these cultures to take on the role of an Effective Altruist - someone who tries to do the most good possible - it could be seen as going against their culture and disappointing those around them. It's [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HdzcvrDnKnkQ65MW2/effective-altruism-and-eastern-ethics
Linkpost URL:
https://ealifestyles.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-and-eastern-ethics
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I've spent quite of time over the last few years trying to answer two questions:Will World War III break out this century? If it does, could it be so devastating that it causes an existential catastrophe, threatening humanity’s long-term future?It's been fun.Last week I published an in-depth problem profile for 80,000 Hours that sums up what I’ve found so far: that World War III is perhaps surprisingly likely and we can’t rule out the possibility of a catastrophic escalation. It also discusses some ideas for how you might be able to help solve this problem.This post includes the top-line summary of the profile. Following that, I draw out the highlights that seem particularly relevant for the EA community.As always, I’m happy to chat to anyone who’d like to discuss this work more. Feel free to shoot me a message here on the Forum or on Twitter. If you’d like to talk about specific career options, you can apply for 80k career coaching here.The heavy tail of war battle deaths (note the log-log scale). We just don't know how far into the tail of terrible outcomes a modern great power war could take us.Profile SummaryEconomic growth and technological progress have bolstered the arsenals of the world’s most powerful countries. That means the next war between them could be far worse than World War II, the deadliest conflict humanity has yet experienced.Could such a war actually occur? We can’t rule out the possibility. Technical accidents or diplomatic misunderstandings could spark a conflict that quickly escalates. Or international tension could cause leaders to decide they’re better off fighting than negotiating.It seems hard to make progress on this problem. It’s also less neglected than some of the problems that we think are most pressing. There are certain issues, like making nuclear weapons or military artificial intelligence systems safer, which seem promising — although it may be more impactful to work on reducing risks from AI, bioweapons or nuclear weapons directly. You might also be able to reduce the chances of misunderstandings and miscalculations by developing expertise in one of the most important bilateral relationships (such as that between the United States and China).Finally, by making conflict less likely, reducing competitive pressures on the development of dangerous technology, and improving international cooperation, you might be helping to reduce other risks, like the chance of future pandemics.Overall view RecommendedWorking on this issue seems to be among the best ways of improving the long-term future we know of, but all else equal, we think it’s less pressing than our highest priority areas (primarily because it seems less neglected and harder to solve).Importance:There's a significant chance that a new great power war occurs this century. Although the world's most powerful countries haven't fought directly since World War II, war has been a constant throughout human history. There have been numerous close calls, and several issues could cause diplomatic disputes in the years to come. These considerations, along with forecasts and statistical models, lead me to think there's about a one-in-three chance that a [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QQFzQKoQdpd58wa6K/great-power-conflict-problem-profile-summary-and-highlights
Linkpost URL:
https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/great-power-conflict/
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Manifund is launching a new regranting program! We will allocate ~$2 million over the next six months based on the recommendations of our regrantors. Grantees can apply for funding through our site;… Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RMXctNAksBgXgoszY/announcing-manifund-regrants
Linkpost URL:
https://manifund.org/rounds/regrants
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AI Safety was, a decade ago, nearly synonymous with obscure mathematical investigations of hypothetical agentic systems. Fortunately or unfortunately, this has largely been overtaken by events; the successes of machine learning and the promise, or threat, of large language models has pushed thoughts of mathematics aside for many in the “AI Safety” community. The once pre-eminent advocate of this class of “agent foundations” research for AI safety, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has more recently said that timelines are too short to allow this agenda to have a significant impact. This conclusion seems at best premature.Foundational research is useful for prosaic alignmentFirst, the value of foundational and mathematical research can be synergistic with both technical progress on safety, and with insight into how and where safety is critical. Many machine learning research agendas for safety are investigating issues identified years earlier by foundational research, and are at least partly informed by that research. Current mathematical research could play a similar role in the coming years, as more funding and research are increasingly available for safety. We have also repeatedly seen the importance of foundational research arguments in discussions of policy, from Bostrom’s book to policy discussions at OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. These connections may be more conceptual than direct, but they are still relevant.Long timelines are possibleSecond, timelines are uncertain. If timelines based on technical progress are short, many claim that we have years not decades until safety must be solved. But this assumes that policy and governance approaches fail, and that we therefore need a full technical solution in the short term. It also seems likely that short timelines make all approaches less likely to succeed. On the other hand, if timelines for technical progress are longer, fundamental advances in understanding, such as those provided by more foundational research, are even more likely to assist in finding or building more technical routes toward safer systems.Aligning AGI ≠ aligning ASIThird, even if safety research is successful at “aligning” AGI systems, both via policy and technical solutions, the challenges of ASI (Artificial SuperIntelligence) still loom large. One critical claim of AI-risk skeptics is that recursive self-improvement is speculative, so we do not need to worry about ASI, at least yet. They also often assume that policy and prosaic alignment is sufficient, or that approximate alignment of near-AGI systems will allow them to approximately align more powerful systems. Given any of those assumptions, they imagine a world where humans and AGI will coexist, so that even if AGI captures an increasing fraction of economic value, it won’t be fundamentally uncontrollable. And even according to so-called Doomers, in that scenario, for some period of time it is likely policy changes, governance, limited AGI deployment, and human-in-the-loop and similar oversight methods to limit or detect misalignment will be enough to keep AGI in check. This provides a stop-gap solution, optimistically for a decade or even two - a critical period - but is insufficient later. And despite OpenAI’s recent announcement that they plan to solve Superalignment, there are strong arguments [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NKMxC2nA47uuhFm8x/a-defense-of-work-on-mathematical-ai-safety
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About the EA ArchiveThe EA Archive is a project to preserve resources related to effective altruism in case of a sub-existential catastrophe such as nuclear war. Its more specific, downstream motivating aim is to increase the likelihood that a movement akin to EA (i.e., one that may go by a different name and be essentially discontinuous with the current movement, but share the broad goal of using evidence and reason to do good) survives, reemerges, and/or flourishes without having to re-invent the wheel, so to speak.It is a work in progress, and some of the subfolders at the referenced Google Drive are already slightly out of date.Theory of ChangeThe theory of change is simple, if not very cheerful to describe: if copies of this information exist in many places around the world, on devices owned by many different people, it is more likely that at least one copy will remain accessible after, say, a war that kills most of the world's population.StructureAs shown in the screenshot, there are three folders. The smallest one, "Main content," contains html, pdf, and other static, text-based files. It is by far the most important to download. If for whatever reason space isn't an issue and you'd like to download the larger folders to, that would be great too.I will post a shortform quick take (at least) when there's been a major enough revision to warrant me asking for people to download a new version.How you can help1) Download!This project depends on people like you downloading and storing the Archive on a computer or flash drive that you personally have physical access to, especially if you live in any of the following:Southeast Asia + Pacific (esp. New Zealand)South and Central AfricaNorthern Europe (esp. Iceland)Latin America, Mexico City and south (esp. Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina)Any very rural area, anywhereIf you live in one of the shaded areas (green or blue), I would love to buy you a flash drive to make this less annoying and/or enable you to store copies in multiple locations, so please get in touch via the Google Form, DM, or any other method.2) Suggest/submit, and provide feedbackCurrently, the limiting factor on the Archive's contents is my ability and willingness to find identify relevant resources and then scrape or download them (i.e., not the cost or feasibility of storage). If you notice something ought to be in there that isn't, please use this Google Form to do any of the following...Let me know what it is, broadly (good) Send me a list of urls containing the info (better)Send me a Google Drive link with the files you'd like added (best)Provide any general feedback or suggestionsI may have to be somewhat judicious about large video and audio files, but virtually any relevant and appropriate pdf/text/web/spreadsheet content should be fine.[1]3) ShareSend this post to friends, especially other EAs who do not regularly use the Forum! FAQHow sure are you that this is at all necessary/helpful?Not super sure! All things considered I think there's like a 70% chance I'd have [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DndmvDGStD3gTfhXk/announcing-the-ea-archive
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[This post contains the Happier Lives Institute's for next 18 month. After a foreword, we give a brief summary of our plans, then go into more depth]ForewordThe idea that the quality of a society should be judged by the happiness of its people is an old idea, stretching back at least to the Enlightenment, if not Aristotle. What’s new is that now we have data: in the last few decades, researchers have developed valid and reliable ways to measure wellbeing through self-reports, and amassed a treasure trove of evidence. For the first time in human history, we can work out the best ways to improve the human condition in a scientifically rigorous way.But what are these ways? That’s what the Happier Lives Institute was set up to find out. We are the first organisation to combine the principles of effective altruism (that is, we should do the most good we can with the available resources) with the idea of taking happiness seriously (by prioritising using happiness data to figure out what does the most good).We conduct foundational research on the nature and measurement of wellbeing, as well as applied research where we synthesise the existing data on subjective wellbeing to discover which interventions and organisations are the most cost-effective. Our research draws on and further develops previous work in the fields of philosophy, economics, and psychology. Ultimately, we measure impact in WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life years), a method born in academia and now used by, for example, the UK Treasury, that we are developing and deploying.We aim to have impact by:Identifying the most cost-effective ways to make lives happier, then communicating these to philanthropists and policymakers.More broadly, engineering a paradigm shift towards a wellbeing approach among decision-makers: vast sums of resources are aimed at improving people’s lives, and if those can be spent even a bit better, that would do enormous good. But we think they can be spent substantially better.This is our third research agenda, which sets out our research goals through the end of 2024 (see our first and second agendas). When we started in 2019, we wanted to know if taking happiness seriously might change the priorities for donors seeking to do the most good. That is, if we evaluated – for the first time – different interventions in terms of their impact on subjective wellbeing, would we uncover different top charities?To that end, our first major line of applied research explored the impact of mental health interventions on wellbeing. We found that psychotherapy was a promising – yet overlooked – intervention in low-income countries. We compared the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy to other well-evidenced interventions, including cash transfers, antimalarial bednets, and deworming pills. From this work, we’ve found that psychotherapy is several times more cost-effective than cash transfers or deworming for improving happiness. We concluded that comparing psychotherapy to antimalarial bednets, a life-saving intervention, depends heavily on various philosophical assumptions: treating depression ranges from about as good as to several times better than antimalarial bednets, depending on the assumptions. This has led [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LAxHnFpumCANAk32r/hli-s-2023-4-research-agenda
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The Happier Lives Institute (HLI) is a non-profit research institute that seeks to find the best ways to improve global wellbeing, then share what we find. Established in 2019, we have pioneered the use of subjective wellbeing measures (aka ‘taking happiness seriously’) to work out how to do the most good.HLI is currently funding constrained and needs to raise a minimum of 205,000 USD to cover operating costs for the next 12 months. We think we could usefully absorb as much as 1,020,000 USD, which would allow us to expand the team, substantially increase our output, and provide a runway of 18 months. This post is written for donors who might want to support HLI’s work to:identify and promote the most cost-effective marginal funding opportunities at improving human happiness.support a broader paradigm shift in philanthropy, public policy, and wider society, to put people’s wellbeing, not just their wealth, at the heart of decision-making.improve the rigour of analysis in effective altruism and global priorities research more broadly.A summary of our progress so far:Our starting mission was to advocate for taking happiness seriously and see if that changed the priorities for effective altruists. We’re the first organisation to look for the most cost-effective ways to do good, as measured in WELLBYs (Wellbeing-adjusted life years)[1]. We didn’t invent the WELLBY (it’s also used by others e.g. the UK Treasury) but we are the first to apply it to comparing which organisations and interventions do the most good.Our focus on subjective wellbeing (SWB) was initially treated with a (understandable!) dose of scepticism. Since then, all the major actors in effective altruism’s global health and wellbeing space seem to have come around to it (e.g., see these comments by GiveWell, Founders Pledge, Charity Entrepreneurship, GWWC, James Snowden).We’ve assessed several top-regarded interventions for the first time in terms of WELLBYs: cash transfers, deworming, psychotherapy, and anti-malaria bednets. We found treating depression is several times more cost-effective than either cash transfers or deworming. We see this as important in itself as well as a proof of concept: taking happiness seriously can reveal new priorities. We've had some pushback on our results, which was extremely valuable. GiveWell’s own analysis concludes treating depression is 2x as good as cash transfers (see here, which includes our response to GiveWell).We strive to be maximally philosophically and empirically rigorous. For instance, our meta-analysis of cash transfers has since been published in a top academic journal. We’ve shown how important philosophy is for comparing life-improving against life-extending interventions. We’ve won prizes: our report re-analysing deworming led GiveWell to start their “Change Our Mind” competition. Open Philanthropy awarded us money in their Cause Exporation Prize. Our work has an enormous global scope for doing good by influencing philanthropists and public policy-makers to both (1) redirect resources to the top interventions we find and (2) improve prioritisation in general by nudging decision-makers to take a wellbeing approach (leading to resources being spent better, even if not ideally). Regarding (1), we estimate that just over the period of Giving Season 2022, we counterfactually moved around $250,000 to our top [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g4QWGj3JFLiKRyxZe/the-happier-lives-institute-is-funding-constrained-and-needs
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One of the things that surprised me when trying to develop potential interventions for Shrimp Welfare Project, was trying to understand a clear pathway from A (wanting to help shrimps cost-effectively) to Z (having a demonstrably impactful intervention scaling-up).As a result of this, I spent a lot of time reading up on and learning about Programme Development Methodologies - trying to Frankenstein something together that I thought would make sense for us. I want to share this work in case it’s useful to other NGOs (in particular for NGOs in contexts similar to ours). I hope it’s useful to you 🙂A quick note - Though this Roadmap is written in such a way as to outline the steps from A to B to C, etc. in reality, some of these steps may run in parallel (or at least, overlap in some ways). For example, one member of your team may be conducting an Evidence Review, while others are preparing to do some on-the-ground Needs Assessment work. In particular, throughout the Roadmap, you’ll likely continue to revisit and reflect on your Theory of Change, as well as updating and refining your Impact Monitoring.I also wrote some "Appendix posts" to complement this one that some people may find useful:Programme Development Methodologies - Summaries of all the existing methodologies I used as a reference when putting this Roadmap togetherDecision-Making Tools - These can be referred to throughout the Roadmap when a decision needs to be madeCreative-Thinking Tools - Useful tools to help you brainstormExecutive Summary1. Key Decisions - The most important decisions we’ll make, and how to make themThere are some useful Decision-Making and Creative-Thinking that it makes sense to learn early on, as they can be used throughout the roadmap. Not least, to help you with some of the most important decisions you’ll make on the path to impact, such as defining your values and choosing your career area based on personal fit. If starting a nonprofit is the best fit for you, then we can move on to deciding on a charity idea, finding a co-founder and selecting your (initial) implementation country. We can now begin to more concretely understand our path to impact through an (initial) Theory of Change.2. Theory of Change - How and why the program will workNow that you’ve made your key decisions, you can move on to defining your potential program. You’ll do this by first outlining some Project Objectives, before creating your first (likely somewhat broad at this point) Theory of Change diagram, sketching out the Activities you will undertake which lead to your projects Outputs, resulting in the overall positive Outcomes of your project, which ultimately achieves Impact. This will provide some clarity around the impact you intend to make, as well as the pathway to that impact. It’s likely though that there are some gaps in your knowledge and some uncertainties and assumptions in your Theory of Change, which brings us to an Evidence Review.3. Evidence Review - A critical review of secondary sources related to our programWe now have an idea of how we intend to make an impact. It’s time [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Sp6rGZcmqCc7FMQCL/an-impact-roadmap
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AbstractLongtermists have recently argued that it is overwhelmingly important to do what we can to mitigate existential risks to humanity. I consider three mistakes that are often made in calculating the value of existential risk mitigation: focusing on cumulative risk rather than period risk; ignoring background risk; and neglecting population dynamics. I show how correcting these mistakes pushes the value of existential risk mitigation substantially below leading estimates, potentially low enough to threaten the normative case for existential risk mitigation. I use this discussion to draw four positive lessons for the study of existential risk: the importance of treating existential risk as an intergenerational coordination problem; a surprising dialectical flip in the relevance of background risk levels to the case for existential risk mitigation; renewed importance of population dynamics, including the dynamics of digital minds; and a novel form of the cluelessness challenge to longtermism.IntroductionSuppose you are an altruist. You want to do as much good as possible with the resources available to you. What might you do? One option is to address pressing short-term challenges. For example, GiveWell (2021) estimates that $5,000 spent on bed nets could save a life from malaria today. Recently, a number of longtermists (Greaves and MacAskill 2021; MacAskill 2022b) have argued that you could do much more good by acting to mitigate existential risks: risks of existential catastrophes involving “the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development” (Bostrom 2013, p. 15). For example, you might work to regulate chemical and biological weapons, or to reduce the threat of nuclear conflict (Bostrom and Cirkovi ´ c´ 2011; MacAskill 2022b; Ord 2020). Many authors argue that efforts to mitigate existential risk have enormous value. For example, Nick Bostrom (2013) argues that even on the most conservative assumptions, reducing existential risk by just one-millionth of one percentage point would be as valuable as saving a hundred million lives today. Similarly, Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill (2021) estimate that early efforts to detect potentially lethal asteroid impacts in the 1980s and 1990s had an expected cost of just fourteen cents per life saved. If this is right, then perhaps an altruist should focus on existential risk mitigation over short term improvements.There are many ways to push back here. Perhaps we might defend population-ethical assumptions such as neutrality (Naverson 1973; Frick 2017) that cut against the importance of creating happy people. Alternatively, perhaps we might introduce decision-theoretic assumptions such as risk aversion (Pettigrew 2022), ambiguity aversion (Buchak forthcoming) or anti-fanaticism (Monton 2019; Smith 2014) that tell against risky, ambiguous and low-probability gambles to prevent existential catastrophe. We might challenge assumptions about aggregation (Curran 2022; Heikkinen 2022), personal prerogatives (Unruh forthcoming), and rights used to build a deontic case for existential risk mitigation. We might discount the well-being of future people (Lloyd 2021; Mogensen 2022), or hold that pressing current duties, such as reparative duties (Cordelli 2016), take precedence over duties to promote far-future welfare.These strategies set themselves a difficult [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/upgF9yNdtWzt4kgxj/three-mistake-in-the-moral-mathematics-of-existential-risk
Linkpost URL:
https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/david-thorstad-three-mistakes-in-the-moral-mathematics-of-existential-risk/
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Epistemic status: Uncertain. This was about a 40-hour investigation by me, Spencer, a person with ~no biology background. I conclude that more research is needed into every question I pose. This post will be edited if new information comes in.Quirks: I say “we” because writing “I” in formal writing makes me feel weird. Where I say “We are not aware of studies…” I mean that I searched 3-4 relevant key terms on Google Scholar about that question and came up empty.Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Constance Li for sponsoring this project. I am grateful to Contance Li, Michael St. Jules, and Holly Elmore for feedback. I am grateful to two interviewees for their help. (None of the acknowledged people have endorsed or rigorously fact-checked my claims herein.)IntroductionContraPest is the first and only current EPA-approved contraceptive for Norway rats and roof rats.[1] It was approved in 2016 and brought to market in 2021.[2] ContraPest has received increasing attention; for example, it was featured in Time in March 2023.[3] It is touted as a humane option for rat population control that could replace many use cases for rodenticides. Rodenticides tend to cause prolonged, painful deaths, both for rats and for other wild animals, so ContraPest is thought to be an opportunity to improve wild animal welfare.[4] Its manufacturer, SenesTech, claims that “ContraPest is a non-lethal rodenticide/pesticide that does not bioaccumulate, it is not an endocrine disruptor, and its effects are reversible.”[5]ContraPest contains two chemicals in small amounts, 4-vinylcyclohexene diepoxide (VCD)[6] and triptolide. VCD reduces fertility in female rats by depleting ovarian follicles, which mature into eggs. Triptolide reduces fertility in male and female rats by interrupting the development of ovarian follicles and sperm.[1] However, as we will see below, these chemicals might have side effects like permanent reductions in fertility, cancer, bone loss, organ injury, immunosuppression, and hormone disruption at high doses. More research in needed into the one-time and repeated doses where these side effects become apparent in rats, animals that eat rats, other animals that might come into contact with ContraPest, and humans.We have yet to see a post that thoroughly and critically evaluates SenesTech’s claims about ContraPest. However, we have come to know that “many cities”[7] and at least one animal sanctuary that ran pilots of ContraPest did not continue to use the product due to their concerns about its effectiveness and side effects. To better understand how this product affects wild animal welfare, we attempt to evaluate SenesTech’s claims below. You can skip to the Conclusion, or read the TL;DRs at the top of each section.(We wrote this report after reading Holly Elmore et al.’s sequence for Rethink Priorities, “The rodenticide reduction sequence.” You can read our summary of the sequence here.)QuestionsWe have the following questions about ContraPest. We will only be able to answer some of them.Why did the cities and organizations that tried ContraPest stop using it?At what dose is ContraPest toxic?Is it true that ContraPest causes no pain or suffering to the animals that ingest it?What are the side effects at various doses [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/85gP3mxnpDuqKgSfk/evaluating-claims-about-contrapest
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Summary:If you apply and are rejected, then I (and presumably other hiring managers) will often either not remember you — or actually be enthusiastic about you (e.g if you made it to later hiring rounds) if anyone asks in the future.People who have been rejected from the CEA Online team have gotten concrete job opportunities that they would not have gotten if they had never appliedIf you're rejected, I can also give you advice and connect you to other opportunities.Rejection is hard, but fear of it shouldn't stop you from applying.Note: I wrote this year ago and temporal references like “the most recent” should be interpreted relative to that. Importantly: I no longer am on the Online team, although I think this post is still roughly accurate for them.I sometimes talk to people who are nervous about applying to EA organizations because they think a rejection could damage their chances at not just the organization they apply to but all EA organizations.This fear is not completely ungrounded – EA is a small community, and hiring managers do occasionally talk to each other about candidates. As with most worries with how others think of you though, "You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do":[1] 100+ people apply to CEA per month, and my memory is pretty bad. The people grading applications will probably not remember people whose applications they reject, especially if that happens early on, and if it happens later, that likely means that they saw something promising. (There are also other costs to applying, like your time and energy.)I wanted to point out though that being rejected as a candidate, particularly if you make it to the final round of a hiring process, can actually be substantially positive.Here are some things that happened to rejected candidates in some of the hiring rounds I ran:Hired by CEA as a contractor for a position similar to what they applied to (the position we were hiring for ended up needing slightly more than 1 FTE of work, so we hired them to do some of the overfill)Received a grant to quit their job and work independently on something similar to what they applied to after I encouraged them to do so and recommended the grantRepeatedly consulted CEA on their area of expertise as a volunteer (though we offered to pay them, they just declined payment)Received a grant from LTFF to skill up after I endorsed them, based on what I learned during their hiring processI also try to give useful feedback to candidates who are rejected.[2] Here is an email I recently received from a rejected applicant, which Carly (the applicant) kindly agreed to share publicly:Hi Ben,Hope you are well! I was in the Project Coordinator search at CEA a few months ago and wanted to drop you a quick note of gratitude. I want to thank you for your part in helping to transition my career into EA. I was very hopeful about getting the role [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ykq4hEQwEFdspAMyr/benefits-of-being-rejected-from-cea-s-online-team
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I recently read a Richard Hanania article titled "Eating Animals and the Virtues of Honesty." It talks about the moral atrocity that is factory farming and how that relates to Hanania's personal dietary choices. I commend him for calling out how bad most animal agriculture is. Hanania understands that there is no excuse to torture so many sentient beings just because we like how they taste. He concedes it could very well be one of the worst crimes in human history. Given all that, he wishes he could be vegan. Unfortunately, he must continue to eat animals. If he stops, he will ruin his body composition: I just grant to the vegan that he has won the argument, and he is morally superior from a utilitarian perspective, but I want to be thin and have broad shoulders.His argument, as I understand it, boils down to the idea that he needs to eat animals in order be fit, strong, and healthy. His position made me think of these great tweets:I am tempted to poke fun at Hanania, but I used to have the exact same worry! So I am going to do the ethical thing and talk about my personal experience as a jacked vegan. I know it's easy to google “vegan weightlifter” or "vegan athlete" or visit r/veganfitness to find examples vegans with shoulders so broad they'd make Hanania weep. My goal with this post is to normalize the idea that even late 30’s, tech working, regular guy vegans can be muscular and healthy. Sorry if this comes across as bragging, or if it's cringey. It just struck me while reading the Hanania piece that more people might go vegan if they felt they could do so without withering away. I want Hanania to know he can have his cake and eat it too! Were he to internalize that, how many people amongst his large audience could he influence to change their diets? How much suffering could he reduce? I don't think it would be easy, possible, or desirable for every vegan to have big muscles. Nor do I think that a fully vegan diet is the healthiest choice for everyone. All I'm saying is that if what's holding you back from going vegan is a deep rooted fear that doing so will cause you to have small shoulders, I think you should reconsider. Old friends who came to visit during that period did repeatedly ask me if I was sick, because of the amount of weight I had lost-- largely muscle. I had grown paler as well.Health and strength are priorities for me. I didn't want to become pale and frail. But after I got my first puppy I decided that I could no longer tolerate the idea of eating other sentient beings, so I stopped. Oscar, the vegan catalystI went vegetarian for a month, then vegan. I figured I could always start eating meat again if my body fell apart.The whole getting pale and weak thing just…didn’t happen to me. At all. I kept expecting to lose weight, [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjwJaBuxfHbrr3CbS/getting-over-my-fear-that-going-vegan-would-make-me-weak-and
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This is the second part of "Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk", a series of blog posts by David Thorstad that aims to identify ways in which estimates of the value of reducing existential risk have been inflated. I've made this linkpost part of a sequence.In the decades to come, advanced bioweapons could threaten human existence. Although the probability of human extinction from bioweapons may be low, the expected value of reducing the risk could still be large, since such risks jeopardize the existence of all future generations. We provide an overview of biotechnological extinction risk, make some rough initial estimates for how severe the risks might be, and compare the cost-effectiveness of reducing these extinction-level risks with existing biosecurity work. We find that reducing human extinction risk can be more cost-effective than reducing smaller-scale risks, even when using conservative estimates. This suggests that the risks are not low enough to ignore and that more ought to be done to prevent the worst-case scenarios.Millett and Snyder-Beattie, “Existential risk and cost-effective biosecurity”1. IntroductionThis is Part 2 of a series based on my paper “Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk”.Part 1 introduced the series and discussed the first mistake: focusing on cumulative rather than per-unit risk. We saw how bringing the focus back to per-unit rather than cumulative risk was enough to change a claimed small’ risk reduction of one millionth of one percent into an astronomically large reduction that would drive risk to almost one in a million per century.Today, I want to focus on a second mistake: ignoring background risk. The importance of modeling background risk is one way to interpret the main lesson of my paper and blog series “Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils.” Indeed, in Part 7 of that series, I suggested just this interpretation.It turns out that blogging is sometimes a good way to write a paper. Today, I want to expand my discussion in Part 7 of the existential risk pessimism series to clarify the second mistake (ignoring background risk) and to show how it interacts with the first mistake (focusing on cumulative risk) in a leading discussion of cost-effective biosecurity.Some elements of this discussion are lifted verbatim from my earlier post. In my defense, I remind my readers that I am lazy.2. Snyder-Beattie and Millett on cost-effective biosecurityAndrew Snyder-Beattie holds a DPhil in Zoology from Oxford, and works as a Senior Program Officer at Open Philanthropy. Snyder-Beattie is widely considered to be among the very most influential voices on biosecurity within the effective altruist community.Piers Millett is a Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. Millett holds advanced degrees in science policy, research methodology and international security, and has extensive industry experience in biosecurity.Millett and Snyder-Beattie’s paper, “Existential risk and cost-effective biosecurity”, is among the most-cited papers on biosecurity written by effective altruists. The paper argues that even very small reductions in existential risks in the biosecurity sector (henceforth,biorisks’) are cost-effective by standard metrics.Millett and Snyder-Beattie estimate the cost-effectiveness [...]
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https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/awmsvYwXk2yjCN3uT/mistakes-in-the-moral-mathematics-of-existential-risk-part-2
Linkpost URL:
https://ineffectivealtruismblog.com/2023/06/30/mistakes-in-the-moral-mathematics-of-existential-risk-part-2-ignoring-background-risk/
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This is the first part of "Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk", a series of blog posts by David Thorstad that aims to identify ways in which estimates of the value of reducing existential risk have been inflated. I've made this linkpost part of a sequence.Even if we use … conservative estimates, which entirely ignor[e] the possibility of space colonization and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 1016 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives.Nick Bostrom, “Existential risk prevention as global priority”1. IntroductionThis is Part 1 of a series based on my paper, “Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk.”(Almost) everyone agrees that human extinction would be a bad thing, and that actions which reduce the chance of human extinction have positive value. But some authors assign quite high value to extinction mitigation efforts. For example:Nick Bostrom argues that even on the most conservative assumptions, reducing existential risk by just one millionth of one percentage point would be as valuable as saving a hundred million lives today.Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill estimate that early asteroid-detection efforts saved lives at an expected cost of fourteen cents per life.These numbers are a bit on the high side. If they are correct, then on many philosophical views the truth of longtermism will be (nearly) a foregone conclusion.I think that these, and other similar estimates, are inflated by many orders of magnitude. My paper and blog series “Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils” brought out one way in which these numbers may be too high: they will be overestimates unless the Time of Perils Hypothesis is true.My aim in this paper is to bring out three novel ways in which many leading estimates of the value of existential risk mitigation have been inflated. (The paper should be online as a working paper within a month.)I’ll introduce the mistakes in detail throughout the series, but it might be helpful to list them now.Mistake 1: Focusing on cumulative risk rather than per-unit risk.Mistake 2: Ignoring background risk.Mistake 3: Neglecting population dynamics.I show how many leading estimates make one, or often more than one of these mistakes.Correcting these mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk has two important implications.First, many debates have been mislocated, insofar as factors such as background risk and population dynamics are highly relevant to the value of existential risk mitigation, but these factors have rarely figured in recent debates.Second, many authors have overestimated the value of existential risk mitigation, often by many orders of magnitude.In this series, I review each mistake in turn. Then I consider implications of this discussion for current and future debates. Today, I look at the first mistake, focusing on cumulative rather than per-unit risk.2. Bostrom’s conservative scenarioNick Bostrom (2013) considers what he terms [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zRLhq5A7eE6ayA9D5/mistakes-in-the-moral-mathematics-of-existential-risk-part-1
Linkpost URL:
https://ineffectivealtruismblog.com/2023/05/27/mistakes-in-the-moral-mathematics-of-existential-risk-part-1-introduction-and-cumulative-risk/
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Douglas Hofstadter is best known for authoring Godel, Escher, Bach, a book on artificial intelligence (among other things) which is sort of a cult classic. In a recent interview, he says he's terrified of recent AI progress and expresses beliefs similar to many people who focus on AI xrisk.
Hoftstadter: The accelerating progress has been so unexpected that it has caught me off guard... not only myself, but many many people. There's a sense of terror akin to an oncoming tsunami that could catch all of humanity off guard. It's not clear whether this could mean the end of humanity in the sense of the systems we've created destroying us, it's not clear if that's the case but it's certainly conceivable. If not, it's also that it just renders humanity a small, almost insignificant phenomenon, compared to something that is far more intelligent and will become as incomprehensible to us as we are to cockroaches. Interviewer: That's an interesting thought. Hoftstadter: Well I don't think it's interesting. I think it's terrifying. I hate it.
I think this is the first time he's publicly expressed this, and his views seem to have changed recently. Previously he published this which listed a bunch of silly questions GPT-3 gets wrong and concluded that
There are no concepts behind the GPT-3 scenes; rather, there’s just an unimaginably huge amount of absorbed text upon which it draws to produce answers
though it ended with a gesture to the fast pace of change and inability to predict the future. I randomly tried some of his stumpers on GPT-4 and it gets them right (and I remember being convinced when this came out that GPT-3 could get them right too with a bit of prompt engineering, though I don't remember specifics). I find this a bit emotional because of how much I loved Godel, Escher, Bach in early college. It was my introduction to "real" math and STEM, which I'd previously disliked and been bad at; because of this book, I majored in computer science. It presented a lot of philosophical puzzles for and problems with AI, and gave beautiful, eye-opening answers to them. I think Hofstadter expected us to understand AI much better before we got to this level of capabilities, in the way his parables and thought experiments created understanding on some things. Now I work professionally on situations along the lines of what he describes in the interview (and feel a similar way about them) — it's a weird way to meet Hofstadter again. See also Gwern's post on LessWrong.
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3sJbwpGbAu5tpGkqD/douglas-hoftstadter-concerned-about-ai-xrisk
Linkpost URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfXxzAVtdpU&t=1763s
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My understanding from the FTX fallout is that SBF was driven by an extreme form of total utilitarianism with little respect for virtues such as honesty. I think this kind of attitude is very rare in EA. To some, this may be reason not to worry too much about future PR risks to EA.But I think it is normal across social, political and religous movements for PR risks to come from fringe, rare and extreme views within the movement.I think we've seen examples of this in: the effect of Salafist jihadism on the reputation of Islamthe effect of "Antifa" on the reputation of the American leftthe effect of more extreme and authoritarian views on the reputation of the social justicey leftBut also just in general, historically many political movements have developed a smaller violent wing which harms the reputation of the wider movement.I think this has important implications for how EA tackles major PR risks going forward.Firstly, CEA should bear in mind that as EA grows, its fringes will grow larger, and the probability of an individual holding a very extreme interpretation of EA principles will increase.Secondly, a subgroup having a fringe view inside EA should be seen by CEA to make them more likely, rather than less likely, to pose a PR risk.Thirdly, CEA and other EA orgs should pre-empt, and firmly reject predictable extremism inside EA. This includes further cases of stealing-to-give / fraud-to-give, but also violence towards perceived bad actors. This kind of extremism and more severe violations of deontological principles might become more likely the closer we get to AGI / as people shorten their timelines, and may particularly become more common amongst those with high P(doom).Some concrete actions I'd like to see:Giving What We Can and Founders Pledge prominently and explicitly making it clear that they condemn and discourage stealing-to-give. This should be prominent enough to make GWWC and FP fairly claim to be at no fault whatsoever for potential future cases of stealing-to-give by signatories. 80 000 Hours should do the same on its pages about earning-to-give.CEA should add honesty and non-violence as separate fifth and sixth "principles which unite effective altruism" for greater emphasis. Community builders should emphasise honesty as a key EA value.Community builders (and other people) should emphasise non-violence as an EA value more often, to the extent that EAs can fairly claim to be at no fault whatsoever for potential future cases of violence motivated by extreme, fringe interpretations of EA principles.In particular, I'd like to stress that we should not wait for someone to commit an act of violence in the name of EA before we dedicate ourselves to non-violence, for both PR reasons and to just prevent violence in the first place.(Obviously, there are less PR focused reasons to do these things, but I just wanted to focus on PR for the purposes of this post) Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xkzofq9LN8KkoRqXZ/pr-risks-come-from-the-fringes-1
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Many U.S. congressional internship applications are closing in the next few weeks for Fall (Sep- Dec) internships. This is a relatively low-effort, high reward thing to do if you you’re interested in testing your fit for policy. I (Elika) interned in my congressional office for a semester just from off-the-cuff applying to test my fit and build my resume. This experience has been incredibly helpful (I now work for the US government and it gives me some more credibility in D.C). Many applications are closing within the next 1-2 weeks. We’re offering to support anyone considering applying.This is a particularly good fit if you’re:Interested in working in policy, politics, or governance solutions to problemsAn undergraduate studentAble to work part-time (10+ hours per week)If you think this could be a good opportunity, we recommend:Reading this guide to internships which has information on which offices to choose from and how to apply and more (including this helpful link of all the Congressional office internships)Making a list of offices you think you’d be a good fit forApplying! When in doubt, apply - there’s no harm in applying if you’re serious about exploring this opportunity. We’re offering to support if you’re interested.Sign up to get support applying hereThings we can help with:Whether or not you’d be a good fit for the positionsReview your resume, cover letter & offices you’re interested inAccountability for submitting applications by the deadline Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pdMjPuddtHeLSBDiF/apply-to-fall-policy-internships-we-can-help
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The Lightspeed application asks: “What impact will [your project] have on the world? What is your project’s goal, how will you know if you’ve achieved it, and what is the path to impact?”LTFF uses an identical question, and SFF puts it even more strongly (“What is your organization’s plan for improving humanity’s long term prospects for survival and flourishing?”). I’ve applied to all three grants of these at various points, and I’ve never liked this question. It feels like it wants a grand narrative of an amazing, systemic project that will measurably move the needle on x-risk. But I’m typically applying for narrowly defined projects, like “Give nutrition tests to EA vegans and see if there’s a problem”. I think this was a good project. I think this project is substantially more likely to pay off than underspecified alignment strategy research, and arguably has as good a long tail. But when I look at “What impact will [my project] have on the world?” the project feels small and sad. I feel an urge to make things up, and express far more certainty for far more impact than I believe. Then I want to quit, because lying is bad but listing my true beliefs feels untenable.I’ve gotten better at this over time, but I know other people with similar feelings, and I suspect it’s a widespread issue (I encourage you to share your experience in the comments so we can start figuring that out).I should note that the pressure for grand narratives has good points; funders are in fact looking for VC-style megabits. I think that narrow projects are underappreciated, but for purposes of this post that’s beside the point: I think many grantmakers are undercutting their own preferred outcomes by using questions that implicitly push for a grand narrative. I think they should probably change the form, but I also think we applicants can partially solve the problem by changing how we interact with the current forms.My goal here is to outline the problem, gesture at some possible solutions, and create a space for other people to share data. I didn’t think about my solutions very long, I am undoubtedly missing a bunch and what I do have still needs workshopping, but it’s a place to start. More on the costs of the questionPushes away the most motivated peopleEven if you only care about subgoal G instrumentally, G may be best accomplished by people who care about it for its own sake. Community building (real building, not a euphemism for recruitment) benefits from knowing the organizer cares about participants and the community as people and not just as potential future grist for the x-risk mines. People repeatedly recommended a community builder friend of mine apply for funding, but they struggled because they liked organizing for its own sake, and justifying it in x-risk terms felt bad. [Although there are also downsides to organizers with sufficiently bad epistemics.]Additionally, if G is done by someone who cares about it for its own sake, then it doesn’t [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eLe8YG2AdQ3W9YtJY/grant-applications-and-grand-narratives
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This post is aimed at those working in jobs which are funded by EA donors who might be interested in voluntarily earning less. This post isn't aimed to influence pay scales at organisations, or at those not interested in earning less. When the Future Fund was founded in 2022, there was a simultaneous upwards pressure on both ambitiousness and net-earnings in the wider EA community. The pressure to be ambitious resulted in EAs really considering the opportunity cost of key decisions. Meanwhile, the discussions around why EAs should consider ordering food or investing in a new laptop pointed towards a common solution: EAs in direct work earning more.The funding situation has significantly shifted from then, as has the supply-demand curve for EA jobs. This should put a deflationary pressure on EAs' salaries, but I'd argue we largely haven't seen this effect, likely because people's salaries are "sticky". One result of this is that there are a lot of impactful projects which are unable to find funding right now, and in a similar vein, there's a lot of productive potential employees who are unable to get hired right now. There's even a significant proportion of employees who will be made redundant. This seems a shame, since these no good reasons for salaries to be sticky. It seems especially bad if we do in fact see significant redundancies, since under a "veil of ignorance" the optimal behaviour would be to voluntarily lower your salary (assuming you could get your colleagues to do the same). Members of German labour unions quite commonly do something similar (Kurzarbeit) during economic downturns, to avoid layoffs and enable faster growth during an upturn Some Reasons you Might Want to Earn Less: You want to do as much good as possible, and suspect your organisation will do more good if it had more money at hand.Your Organisation is likely to make redundancies, which could include you.You have short timelines, and you suspect that by earning less, more people could work on alignment.You can consider your voluntary pay-cut a donation, which you can report on your GWWC account. (The great thing about pay-cut donations is you essentially get a 100% tax refund, which is particularly nice if you live somewhere with high income tax). Some Reasons you May Not Want to Earn Less: It would cause you financial hardship.You would experience a significant drop in productivity. You suspect it would promote an unhealthy culture in your organisation.You expect you're much better than the next-best candidate, and you'd be less likely to work in a high impact role if you had to earn less. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GxRcKACcJuLBEJPmE/consider-earning-less
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SummaryEffective giving can be quite impactful.I estimated the factual non-marginal multipliers until 2021 of Ayuda Efectiva (Spain), Doebem (Brazil), Effektiv Spenden (Germany), and Giving What We Can (GWWC), i.e. how much donations they moved per dollar spent. Those of Ayuda Efectiva (1.34) and Doebem (5.53) are much lower than those of Effektiv Spenden (61.2) and GWWC (135).However, the results might differ accounting for future donations (received after 2021, but caused until then), counterfactuals, diminishing marginal returns, cost-effectiveness of caused donations, and indirect impacts of effective giving. Furthermore, the organisations were at different levels of maturity. Consequently, my estimates for the factual non-marginal multipliers are not directly comparable, and I do not know which of the 4 organisations are more effective at the margin.I did not find any proper cost-effectiveness analyses of Ayuda Efectiva, Doebem or Effektiv Spenden. I encourage these and other effective giving organisations as well as their funders (namely, Open Philanthropy) to do and publish cost-effectiveness analyses of their work (ideally including the indirect impacts of effective giving), as GWWC has done.IntroductionEffective giving can be quite impactful:Supporting with 0.399 $/year the corporate campaigns for chicken welfare of The Humane League might be enough to neutralise the suffering of factory-farmed animals caused by a random person[1]. This estimate can easily be off by a factor of 10, but illustrates that the (financial and non-financial) costs/savings of switching to a fully plant-based diet may well be much higher[2].Helen Keller International’s vitamin A supplementation program has a cost-effectiveness of 3.5 k$ per life saved, i.e. one can save 13.8 lives (= 48.3/3.5) for the average transaction price of new cars in the United States in April 2023 of 48.3 k$.So there are good reasons for giving effectively and significantly to become a cultural norm. This is a primary goal of effective giving organisations, and I have estimated the factual non-marginal multiplier of a few of them to get a sense of whether they are accomplishing it effectively. To clarify:A factual non-marginal multiplier of x means the effective giving organisation moved x $ of donations (hopefully to effective organisations) for each dollar it spent.A counterfactual non-marginal multiplier of y means the effective giving organisation caused y $ of donations for each dollar it spent.A counterfactual marginal multiplier of z means the effective giving organisation would have caused z $ of donations for each additional dollar it had spent.y < x because effective giving organisations do not cause all the donations they move[3], and z < y owing to diminishing marginal returns. The effective giving organisations is underfunded if z < 1, as long as the counterfactual marginal multiplier includes all relevant effects.I was curious about Ayuda Efectiva and Doebem because their results could be more generalisable to Portugal (where I am from). I looked into Effektiv Spenden owing to it being regarded as a successful example of effective giving, and included GWWC as a major reference in this space.MethodsI calculated the factual non-marginal multipliers from the ratio between donations received to be directed towards effective organisations and costs[4]. I neglected future donations, and did not account for the opportunity cost of workers [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dBdNoSAbkG4k98GT9/evidence-of-effectiveness-and-transparency-of-a-few
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This post is part of a series of 6 interviews. As EAs, we want to use our careers or donations to do the most good - but it’s difficult to work out what exactly that looks like for us. I wanted to interview effective altruists working in different fields and on different causes and ask them how they chose their cause area, and how they relate to effective altruism and doing good more generally. During the Prague Fall Season residency, I interviewed six EAs in Prague about what they are doing and why they are doing it. I’m grateful to my interviewees for giving their time, and to the organisers of PFS for supporting my visit. Juan B. García Martínez was born in La Mancha, Spain, and studied Chemical Engineering in Madrid (BA) and the Netherlands (MA). Looking for neglected opportunities in climate change, he wrote his Bachelor’s thesis on solar silicon and his Master’s thesis on CO2 capture. During this time, he also became deeply concerned with farmed animal suffering and global catastrophic risks. He is now Research Manager at ALLFED. In his current work, he assesses whether and how we might use various technologies to produce food that is resilient to global catastrophes, for example fermentation technology, single cell proteins from CO₂ or natural gas, sugars from plant fiber or CO₂, fats from microorganisms or hydrocarbons, microbial electrosynthesis, and non-biological synthesis of food from CO₂ or hydrocarbons. He hopes that this work will help to mitigate the effects of global catastrophic risks, but also reduce our dependence on factory farming, thus reducing animal suffering and carbon emissions. On producing food without sunlightAmber: What are you currently working on at ALLFED?Juan: My research has been focused on non-agricultural, independent, industrial food production. We’re looking at how we could produce food without requiring any sunlight at all, to complement methods that use sunlight more efficiently. Specifically, I’ve been studying industrial factories, chemical processing, food production, and a lot of biotech ingredients and alternative protein stuff.I’m also doing some more general projects, like looking into technology readiness more broadly. Which of these things are more or less ready to go than the others?Amber: Which things are the most ready-to-go?Juan: Obviously agriculture, that’s pretty straightforward, though crop relocation would be needed to maintain yields. For more technology-based stuff, I research methane single cell proteins, which they’re already making at the industrial scale. Also lignocellulosic sugar, which is converting trees and leaves into sugars — that’s been done before at some scale.Amber: How long have you been working at ALLFED?Juan: I started there as a research volunteer at the end of 2019. I really liked the type of research that they were doing: it was similar to what I’d been doing at university, with my Master’s. So I started volunteering there while I was finishing my Master's thesis on atmospheric CO2 capture, because I was getting a little tired of that. I did that for four months. I spent a lot of time working on ALLFED projects. [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/p6oP854ZCZ6skojx6/juan-b-garcia-martinez-on-tackling-many-causes-at-once-and
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https://contemplatonist.substack.com/p/juan-b-garcia-martinez-on-tackling
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Every year at Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), we try to find the best interventions for impact-focused charities to launch through our Incubation Program. Our research in 2022 focused on health security (which includes biosecurity) and on large-scale global health. This post outlines:An introduction to health security at CE. What CE means by health security exactly, some of CE’s views on preventing catastrophic and existential risks, and why we picked “health security” as a topic. Our prioritization of the top health security interventions. Why rigorous prioritization of ideas is needed to be effective in the world (especially for longtermist cause areas), and CE’s approach to this within health security.Our results. The long list of nearly 200 ideas, our top six shortlisted ideas, and our final recommendations.If you’d like to learn how to conduct similar prioritization research, and how to evaluate the results that come out of starting high-impact interventions, we have just launched our Research Training Program that you can apply to by July 17, 2023.Introduction to health security at CEWhat we mean by health securityWe took a fairly broad interpretation of health security. Our initial definition was: anything that minimizes the danger of acute public health events.This included several broad categories:Pandemic preventionPandemic preparednessGeneral risk preparedness for acute public health eventsAntimicrobial resistanceHealth system strengtheningOther / meta ideas (e.g., better biosecurity forecasting)This included looking at both natural pandemics and engineered pandemics (which could be due to accidental or deliberate misuse of biotech).How much does CE value preventing catastrophic/existential risks? This may seem like a bit of a cop-out answer, but there are a wide range of views on this topic among CE staff. There is no clear overarching organizational view or policy. This section gives a rough sense of how “CE staff” might tend to think about these topics, but probably doesn’t accurately reflect any individual staff member’s stance.In general, CE’s staff tend to apply a very high level of empirical rigor to decision making. Staff tend to trust empirical evidence (e.g., RCTs, M&E of existing charities, base-rate forecasting, etc.) above other kinds of evidence, particularly valuing such evidence above theoretical reasoned arguments. That said, staff tend to accept that making good decisions requires robust/cluster thinking and look for cases where many kinds of evidence align, including theoretical reasoning. Along the same lines, staff are likely to think that doing good is really difficult and having some ongoing measurable evidence of impact is probably required.In general, CE staff believe that preventing extinction is a worthwhile endeavor. However, given the above, staff are likely to be skeptical about:The ability to know what the biggest future risks are, especially where risk estimates rely on reasoned speculation about future technologies.The success of any organization that doesn’t have a clear path to measure the impact of its activities.We took all these views into consideration and chose to focus on health security, including biorisks. This focus allows us (and future CE charities) to explore risk areas that have at least some chance of being globally catastrophic, but also have clear historical precedents and evidence of less extreme catastrophes. [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/chqv4wneoXHpHzdQk/ce-rigorously-prioritizing-the-top-health-security
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Longlist of CausesCEARCH keeps a running longlist of causes (link) that may merit further research to see if they are highly impactful causes worth supporting. The list, which covers the broad areas of global health & development, longtermism, as well as EA meta, is currently around 400 causes long.In compiling this longlist, we have used a variety of methods, as detailed in this search methodology (link); core ones include:Using Nuno’s excellent list as a starting point.Conducting consultations and surveys (e.g. of both EA and non-EA organizations and individuals).Performing outcome tracing (i.e. looking at good/bad outcomes and identifying the underlying causes): The Global Burden of Diseases database and the World Database of Happiness are especially useful in this regard.Our hope is that this list is useful to the community, and not just our own research team.Notes:Classification of causes is fairly arbitrary, and each organization has their own approach. CEARCH find it useful to think of causes in three distinct levels, from broadest to narrowest:(1) High-level cause domain, which are problems defined in the broadest way possible: (a) global well-being, which concerns human welfare in the near-term; (b) animal welfare, which is self-explanatory; (c) longtermism, which concerns human welfare in the long-term; and (d) EA meta, which involves doing good through improving or expanding effective altruism itself.(2) Cause areas, which are significantly narrowed down from high-level cause domains, but are still fairly broad themselves. For example, within global well-being, we might have global health, economic & development, political reform etc(3) Causes, which are problems defined in a fairly narrow way (e.g. malaria, vitamin A deficiency, childhood vaccination, hypertension, diabetes etc).Of course, causes can always be broken down further (e.g. malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, or childhood vaccination for diphtheria), and going through our list, you can also see that causes may overlap (e.g. air pollution in a general sense, vs ambient/outdoor particulate matter pollution, vs indoor air quality, vs specifically indoor household air pollution from soot). The reason for such overlap is partly a lack of time on CEARCH's part to rationalize the whole list; but partly it also reflects our view that it can be valuable to look at problems at different levels of granularity (e.g. at higher levels, a single intervention may be able to solve multiple problems at the same time, such that a broader definition of a cause areas helps find more cost-effective solutions; conversely, at lower levels, you can focus on very targeted interventions that may be very cost-effective but not generally applicable).Note that animal welfare causes are not in this longlist, as CEARCH has so far not focused on them, for want of good moral weights to do evaluations with. This should not be taken to imply that animal causes are unimportant, or that research into cost-effective animal causes is not valuable.Cause Exploration ContestOpen Philanthropy had its excellent Cause Exploration Prize; here, we’ll like to do something similar but make the bar significantly lower.We invite people to suggest potential cause areas, providing a short justification if you [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QYJrH854vZzCFKmoG/longlist-of-causes-cause-exploration-contest
Linkpost URL:
https://exploratory-altruism.org/contest/
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The Mental Health Funding Circle recently completed our second round of funding. We are very happy to support great organizations working on highly impactful mental health interventions. Our next open funding round will be held in the Fall - applications will be due October 1st, with final decisions made in early November. For more information, visit our website. This round, MHFC members disbursed $789,833 to the following organizations, institutions and individuals: $70,000 to Fine Mind for their direct service work on depression in northern Uganda.$78,225 to Phlourish for guided self-help in the Philippines. $50,000 to Happier Lives Institute for continued research on subjective wellbeing metrics and general operating support. $65,000 to Overcome to support their work offering free online therapy. $153,000 to Eggshells for their work on digital guided self-help. $120,000 to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to station task-shifting youth therapy practitioners in HIV clinics in Botswana.$24,000 to School of Hard Knocks to support lay practitioner interpersonal therapy for youth in South Africa. $30,000 to CEARCH for meta research into effective mental health interventions. $99,360 to Columbia University and Makerere University for capacity building for interpersonal therapy in primary care in Uganda. $30,000 to Tata Institute of Social Sciences to support research on interpersonal therapy in primary schools in India. $70,248 to Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute for research on suicidality and suicide prevention in urban settings in Zambia. All funding decisions are made personally by individual circle members and do not necessarily reflect the priorities of the circle. For any information about funding or membership, please reach out! Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4Gjavidm767Cddnuu/mhfc-spring-grants-round
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I stated “I see this mostly as an experiment into whether having a simple “event” can cause people to publish more stuff” and I feel like the answer is conclusively “yes”. I put a little bit of effort into pitching people, and I’m sure that my title and personal connections didn’t hurt, but this really was not a terribly heavy lift.Thanks to the fortnight I have a post I can reference for EA being a do-ocracy! I would encourage other people to try to organize things like this.I noticed an interesting phenomenon: contributors who are less visible in EA wanted to participate because they thought it would give their writing more attention, and people who are more visible in EA wanted to participate because they thought it would give their writing less attention.[1]I think the average EA might underestimate the extent to which being visible in EA (e.g. speaking at EAG) is seen as a burden rather than an opportunity.This feels like an important problem to solve, though outside the bounds of this project.3. Part of my goal was to get conversations that are happening in private into a more public venue. I think this basically worked, at least measured by “conversations that I personally have been having in private”. There are some ways in which karma did not reflect what I personally thought was most important though:I’ve started to worry that it might be important to get digital sentience work (e.g. legal protection for digital beings) before we get transformative AI, and EA’s seem like approximately the only people who could realistically do this in the next ~5 years.[2] So I would have liked to have seen more grappling with this post, although in fairness Jeff wasn’t making a strong pitch for prioritizing AI welfare.I also find myself making the points that Arden raised here pretty regularly, and wish there was more engagement with them.4. When doing a “special event” on the forum, I always wonder whether the event will add to the forum’s engagement or just cannibalize existing engagement. I think the strategy fortnight was mostly additive, although it’s pretty hard to know the counterfactual.5. Some events I would be interested in someone trying to organize on the Forum“Everyone change your job week”[3] – opportunity for people to think seriously about whether they should change their jobs, write up a post about it, and then get feedback from other Forum usersRotblat day – Joseph Rotblat was a physicist on the Manhattan project who was originally motivated by wanting to defeat Nazi Germany, but withdrew once he realized the project was actually motivated by wanting to defeat the USSR. On Rotblat day, people post what signs they would look for to determine if their work was being counterproductive.“Should we have an AI moratorium?” debate week – basically the comments here, except you recruit people to give longer form takes.Video week – people create and post video versions of forum articles (or other EA content)^ Or more specifically: they would be seen as one of many voices, rather [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yhWSx8W5KMTuJzyXt/some-reflections-on-ea-strategy-fortnight
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I was reading Will MacAskill’s recent EA Forum post when I came across a list of names. Will said this is a list of people who would definitely be considered “senior figures” within EA at the moment.I really don’t mind that some of EA’s CEOs call each other to ask for advice or bounce ideas off of each other. I think it’s pretty healthy!But also, I have never heard of at least half of these people??? I cannot be this out of the know, it’s embarrassing. So I did some digging.Who are these “senior figures”?Effective Ventures UK Trustees:Will MacAskill: I know who this guy is. He was on a poster in my local tube station when his book What We Owe the Future came out. He also wrote Doing Good Better before that. Even before last summer’s media push, he was one of the most recognisable people in EA. He’s said he’ll be stepping down as a trustee after a few additional trustees join… but I assume people will still call him and ask for his opinion on things.Claire Zabel: Senior Program Officer at Open Philanthropy.Tasha McCauley: On the board of Effective Ventures UK. Her Linkedin shows she’s been working on AI stuff since at least 2010, but probably much earlier. Also happens to be married to Joseph Gordon Levitt.Nick Beckstead: Helped launch the Centre for Effective Altruism. Joined Open Philanthropy in 2014 (it was still part of GiveWell back then). Left OP to run the ill-fated FTX Future Fund.Effective Ventures US Trustees:Nick Beckstead: See above.Eli Rose: Senior Program Officer at Open Philanthropy.Nicole Ross: Community Health at CEA.Zach Robinson: Interim CEO of Effective Ventures US, starting January 2023, as well as acting as a trustee. Apparently this is more normal in the US than it is in the UK. Previously Chief of Staff at Open Philanthropy.CEOs/Directors:Zach Robinson: See above - CEO and trustee of EV US.Howie Lempel: Interim CEO of Effective Ventures UK, starting January 2023. Known for his appearance on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, talking about working at Open Philanthropy and 80,000 Hours with severe anxiety and depression.Alexander Berger: Co-CEO of Open Philanthropy. Well-represented on Twitter (and the only “senior figure” to appear on both this list and its Twitter parody).Holden Karnofsky: Co-CEO of Open Philanthropy. Went on a three-month sabbatical to explore whether he should move to working on AI safety starting on March 8th - no news yet on whether he’s returned to Open Philanthropy.Ben West: Interim Executive Director of the Centre for Effective AltruismBrenton Mayer: Interim CEO of 80,00 Hours. I’ve been to a few parties with him, which I highly recommend - he’s got a great sense of humour!Other:Max Dalton: Former Executive Director of CEA. In my view, he was a good one - CEA was as bit of a mess before he took over. Resigned in February 2023 and took on an advisory role instead, for the sake of his mental health. Still very involved, including in the search for his replacement.Toby Ord: Founder [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qAbKiFYc2Skg3r5at/short-bios-of-17-senior-figures-in-ea
Linkpost URL:
https://ealifestyles.substack.com/p/will-macaskill-names-17-senior-figures
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I'm excited to share a special opportunity to create a systemic impact: a statewide approval voting ballot initiative in Missouri. This would affect all elections throughout the state including federal and presidential. Approval voting favors consensus candidates and a more accurate representation of the public's support. This is critical if we want a government to behave in our interests on policies that concern our well-being.The organization leading this charge is Show Me Integrity, where I'm currently doing a fellowship and assisting with fundraising efforts. Show Me Integrity has successfully passed a ballot initiative before, showing their ability to succeed on this kind of scale. They also successfully ran the ballot initiative for approval voting in St. Louis.Why is this important?Approval voting is a method that allows voters to select as many candidates as they want; still, most votes wins. Approval voting, an easy-to-implement system, can greatly improve our current plurality-based approach to electing Federal and state-level positions. If you’ve read my writing on this before, you’ve seen me make that case. And this is much more effective and lasting than putting money behind individual candidates. This opportunity may not come around again.The ImpactThis initiative is not just about changing the voting method; it's about transforming how we elect individuals to government office, from local to federal positions, in the 19th largest state of over 6 million people. This includes influencing presidential electoral votes. This is the first statewide ballot initiative for approval voting, making it a pioneering effort with potentially far-reaching implications.The AskWe are currently in the signature-gathering phase, a crucial step that requires initial funding. The cost for signature gathering is around $4M, with an additional $9M needed later for campaign execution. Yes, it's expensive, but the potential impact justifies the investment.About Show Me IntegrityShow Me Integrity has a history of successfully implementing ballot initiatives, including a statewide initiative and passing approval voting in St. Louis. Their experience and proven success make them an ideal organization to lead this initiative. There is no better opportunity.Logistics and ChallengesThere are some challenges to be aware of. The competition for signature gathering means that costs could increase if we can't secure initial funding soon. This could also necessitate the use of different firms, which may not have the same quality. With timely funding, we can overcome these hurdles. Additionally, while the initial polling is over 60% even with opposition messaging, this support can change. Ballot measures can be risky.A Matching OpportunityTo encourage donations, a generous donor is currently offering a match of $600K. This match may end soon, but there's a possibility of an extension. This is a true match, meaning the donor will only match funds that can meaningfully kickstart the signature-gathering process. $100K of this match is already being met by other donors.Your Chance to Make a DifferenceThis is a rare opportunity to contribute to a significant societal change. If you, someone you know, or an institution is interested in supporting this initiative, please reach out to me at aaronhamlin@gmail.com. [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xL8H3TRj3xxenDgEF/transforming-democracy-a-unique-funding-opportunity-for-us
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Epistemic status: Very quickly written, on a thought I've been holding for a year and that I haven't read elsewhere. I believe that within this decade, there could be AGIs (Artificial General Intelligences) powerful enough that the values they pursue might have a value lock-in effect, at least partially. This means they could have a long-lasting impact on the future values and trajectory of our civilization (assuming we survive).This brief post aims to share the idea that if your primary focus and concern is animal welfare (or digital sentience), you may want to consider engaging in targeted outreach on those topics towards those who will most likely shape the values of the first AGIs. This group likely includes executives and employees in top AGI labs (e.g. OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic), the broader US tech community, as well as policymakers from major countries.Due to the risk of lock-in effects, I believe that the values of relatively small groups of individuals like the ones I mentioned (less than 3 000 people in top AGI labs) might have a disproportionately large impact on AGI, and consequently, on the future values and trajectory of our civilization. My impression is that, generally speaking, these people currently a) do not prioritize animal welfare significantly b) do not show substantial concern for digital minds and their sentience. Hence if you believe those things are very important (which I do believe), and you think that AGI might come in the next few decades[1] (which a majority of people in the field believe), you might want to consider this intervention.Feel free to reach out if you want to chat more about this, either here or via my contact you can find here.^Even more so if you believe, as I do along with many software engineers in top AGI labs, that it could happen this decade. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZnPLPFC49nJym7y8g/agi-x-animal-welfare-a-high-ev-outreach-opportunity
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Purpose of this post: The purpose of this post is three-fold: 1) highlight the importance of incident sharing and share best practices from adjacent fields to AI safety 2) collect tentative and existing ideas of implementing a widely used AI incident database and 3) serve as a comprehensive list of existing AI incident databases as of June 2023.Epistemic status: I have spent around 25+ hours researching this topic and this list is by no means meant to be exhaustive. It should give the reader an idea of relevant adjacent fields where incident databases are common practice and should highlight some of the more widely used AI incident databases which exist to date. Please feel encouraged to comment any relevant ideas or databases that I have missed, I will periodically update the list if I find anything new. Motivation for AI Incident DatabasesSharing incidents, near misses and best practices in AI development decreases the likelihood of future malfunctions and large-scale risk. To mitigate risks from AI systems, it is vital to understand the causes and effects of their failures. Many AI governance organizations, including FLI and CSET, recommend creating a detailed database of AI incidents to enable information-sharing between developers, government and the public. Generally, information-sharing between different stakeholders 1) enables quicker identification of security issues and 2) boosts risk-mitigation by helping companies take appropriate actions against vulnerabilities. Best practices from other fieldsNational Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) publishes and maintains a database of aviation accidents, including detailed reports evaluating technological and environmental factors as well as potential human errors causing the incident. The reports include descriptions of the aircraft, how it was operated by the flight crew, environmental conditions, consequences of event, probable cause of accident, etc. The meticulous record-keeping and best-practices recommendations are one of the key factors behind the steady decline in yearly aviation accidents, making air travel one of the safest form of travel.National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) maintains a comprehensive database recording the number of crashes and fatal injuries caused by automobile and motor vehicle traffic, detailing information about the incidents such as specific driver behavior, atmospheric conditions, light conditions or road-type. NHTSA also enforces safety standards for manufacturing and deploying vehicle parts and equipment. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) is a cross-sector public database recording specific vulnerabilities and exposures in information-security systems, maintained by Mitre Corporation. If a vulnerability is reported, it is examined by a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) and entered into the database with a description and the identification of the information-security system and all its versions that it applies to.Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISAC). ISACs are entities established by important stakeholders in critical infrastructure sectors which are responsible for collecting and sharing: 1) actionable information about physical and cyber threats 2) sharing best threat-mitigation practices. ISACs have 24/7 threat warning and incident reporting services, providing relevant and prompt information to actors in various sectors including automotive, chemical, gas utility or healthcare. National Council of Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (NCI) is a cross-sector forum designated for sharing and integrating information among sector-based ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers). It does so through facilitating communication between [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dikcpP32Q3cg6tvdA/ai-incident-sharing-best-practices-from-other-fields-and-a
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TL;DR: We are excited to announce our Research Training Program. This online program is designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions. It is a full-time, fully cost-covered program that will run online for 11 weeks. Apply here!Deadline for application: July 17, 2023The program dates are: October 2 - December 17So far, Charity Entrepreneurship has launched and run two successful training programs: a Charity Incubation Program and a Foundation Program. Now we are piloting a third - a Research Training Program, which will tackle a different problem: The Problem:People: Many individuals are eager to enter research careers, level up their current knowledge and skills from junior to senior, or simply make their existing skills more applicable to work within EA framework/organizations. At the same time, research organizations have trouble filling a senior-level researcher talent gap. There is a scarcity of specific training opportunities for the niche skills required, such as intervention prioritization and cost-effectiveness analyses, which are hard to learn through traditional avenues. Ideas: A lack of capacity for exhaustive investigation means there are a multitude of potentially impactful intervention ideas that remain unexplored. There may be great ideas being missed, as with limited time we will only get to the most obvious solutions that other people are likely to have thought of as well. Evaluation: Unlike the for-profit sector, the nonprofit sector lacks clear metrics for assessing an organization's actual impact. External evaluations can help nonprofits evaluate and reorganize their own effectiveness, and also allow funders to choose the highest impact opportunities available to them- potentially unlocking more funding (sometimes limited by lack of public external evaluation). There are some great organizations that carry out evaluations (e.g., GiveWell), but they are constrained by capacity and have limited scope; this results in several potentially worthwhile organizations remaining unassessed.Who Is This Program For?Motivated researchers who want to produce trusted research outputs to improve the prioritization and allocation decisions of effectiveness-minded organizationsEarly career individuals who are seeking to build their research toolkits and gain practical experience through real projectsExisting researchers in the broader Global Health and Well-being (global health, animal advocacy, mental health, heath/bio security, etc.) communities who are interested in approaching research from an effectiveness-minded perspectiveWhat Does Being a Fellow Involve?Similar to our Charity Incubation Program, the first month focuses on learning generalizable and specific research skills. It involves watching training videos, reading materials, and practicing by applying those skills to concrete mini research projects. Participants learn by doing while we provide guidance and lots of feedback.The second month is focused on applying skills, working on different stages of the research process, and producing final research reports- that could be used to guide real decision-making.Frequent feedback on your projects from experts researchersRegular check-in calls with a mentor for troubleshooting, guidance on research, and your career Writing reports on a selected topicsOpportunity to connect with established researchers and explore potential job opportunitiesAssistance with editing your cause area report for publication and disseminationWhat Are We Offering?11 weeks of online, full-time training with practical research assignments, expert mentoring, feedback, and published output "Shovel ready" research topics that are highly promising, [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AdouuTH7esiDQPExz/announcing-ce-s-new-research-training-program-apply-now
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These are my views, they are not necessarily the views of Effective Altruism Netherlands. Thanks to those people who provided comments on a draft of this post. SummaryIn this post I introduce a set of terms that could be useful for discussing EA community building strategy. I take as a starting point the claim that broadly speaking, effective altruism is an attempt at social change. There are four general approaches to social change: Social Movement Support, Field Building, Network Development, and Promoting the Uptake of Practices by Organizations. The post illustrates these approaches using different historical examples:The Civil Rights Movement mainly used Social Movement SupportThe field of Public Health primarily focused on Field BuildingThe United Nations emphasized Network DevelopmentThe Fair Trade movement concentrated on Promoting the Uptake of Practices by OrganizationsI then take a stab at describing EA’s current approach. Something like: Field Building (40%), Network Development (35%), Movement Support (20%), and Promoting the Uptake of Practices by Organizations (5%).I also suggest a re-balancing: Field Building (50%), Movement Support (25%), Network Development (15%), and Promoting the Uptake of Practices by Organizations (10%). This shift would make EA more engaged with society and more focused on its core mission, while spending less time in its own bubble.Finally, I have a few questions for you, the reader:Do you agree that, broadly speaking, EA is an attempt to bring about social change? Is there something missing from the set of social change approaches I’ve described?What do you think EA’s current social change portfolio is?What do you think it ought to be? How should we inform the above decision? Historical case studies? Something else?IntroductionEffective altruism has been called many things. MacAskill defines it as follows:(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximizethe good with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the good’ inimpartial welfarist terms, and(ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the world.(i) refers to effective altruism as an intellectual project (or ‘research field’); (ii) refers to effective altruism as a practical project (or ‘social movement’).CEA's outward-facing website (effectivealtruism.org) uses a similar definition: “Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice”. Wikipedia also: “Effective altruism is a philosophical and social movement that advocates ‘using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis’”.I think these definitions are broadly correct. However, to speak in more abstract terms, I think EA is an attempt to bring about social change. By social change I mean the large-scale alteration of society. For example, large-scale changes in social institutions, social behaviours, or social relations. Examples of other attempts include: building the field of public health, the fair trade movement, the civil rights movement, and the development of the UN.Following MacAskill’s definition, the social change that EA is aiming for is something like: building effective altruism as a research field and getting more people to [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Cve3s6C5kxow6ScQQ/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-community-building
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There was a debate on the statement “AI research and development poses an existential threat” (“x-risk” for short), with Max Tegmark and Yoshua Bengio arguing in favor, and Yann LeCun and Melanie Mitchell arguing against. The YouTube link is here, and a previous discussion on this forum is here.The first part of this blog post is a list of five ways that I think the two sides were talking past each other. The second part is some apparent key underlying beliefs of Yann and Melanie, and how I might try to change their minds.[1]While I am very much on the “in favor” side of this debate, I didn’t want to make this just a “why Yann’s and Melanie’s arguments are all wrong” blog post. OK, granted, it’s a bit of that, especially in the second half. But I hope people on the “anti” side will find this post interesting and not-too-annoying.Five ways people were talking past each other1. Treating efforts to solve the problem as exogenous or notThis subsection doesn’t apply to Melanie, who rejected the idea that there is any existential risk in the foreseeable future. But Yann suggested that there was no existential risk because we will solve it; whereas Max and Yoshua argued that we should acknowledge that there is an existential risk so that we can solve it.By analogy, fires tend not to spread through cities because the fire department and fire codes keep them from spreading. Two perspectives on this are:If you’re an outside observer, you can say that “fires can spread through a city” is evidently not a huge problem in practice.If you’re the chief of the fire department, or if you’re developing and enforcing fire codes, then “fires can spread through a city” is an extremely serious problem that you’re thinking about constantly.I don’t think this was a major source of talking-past-each-other, but added a nonzero amount of confusion.2. Ambiguously changing the subject to “timelines to x-risk-level AI”, or to “whether large language models (LLMs) will scale to x-risk-level AI”The statement under debate was “AI research and development poses an existential threat”. This statement does not refer to any particular line of AI research, nor any particular time interval. The four participants’ positions in this regard seemed to be:Max and Yoshua: Superhuman AI might happen in 5-20 years, and LLMs have a lot to do with why a reasonable person might believe that.Yann: Human-level AI might happen in 5-20 years, but LLMs have nothing to do with that. LLMs have fundamental limitations. But other types of ML research could get there—e.g. my (Yann’s) own research program.Melanie: LLMs have fundamental limitations, and Yann’s research program is doomed to fail as well. The kind of AI that might pose an x-risk will absolutely not happen in the foreseeable future. (She didn’t quantify how many years is the “foreseeable future”.)It seemed to me that all four participants (and the moderator!) were making timelines and LLM-related arguments, in ways that were both annoyingly vague, and unrelated to the statement under debate.(If astronomers found a [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LEEcSn4gt7nBwBghk/munk-ai-debate-confusions-and-possible-cruxes
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SummaryAnimal Policy International seeks a part-time Policy Manager in New Zealand to support the organisation’s policy and communications work.Role description is available here.Apply before July 7 by filling the form.About the roleAnimal Policy International (API) is looking for a Policy Manager based in New Zealand. By working closely with the Government, farmers and NGOs, the Policy Manager will help drive forward our ask of legislative change in imports. The Policy Manager will contribute to the work of API by delivering advocacy and communications work - and in particular represent the organisation at meetings and events with varied external stakeholders, in person in New Zealand. The Manager will need to be comfortable talking to a diverse range of stakeholders - from politicians and civil servants and to farmers and NGOS. The Manager may also organise events, prepare briefings, position papers and may contribute to public consultations. With the role being flexible it may suit someone who already works full time in another role and would like to do some additional policy work.Position SummaryApplication Deadline: 7 JulyStart Date: July/AugustDuration: 6 months (will likely be extended)Hours: 4 hours a week average (flexible, tailored to organisation’s needs and availability of Policy Manager)Compensation: NegotiableEmployment type: ContractorLocation: Remote, preferably WellingtonProcess: There will be an interview and 2-hour test taskTo apply please fill in the form.About Animal Policy InternationalAnimal Policy International is a Charity Entrepreneurship incubated organisation working in cooperation with farmers, NGOs and policymakers towards responsible imports that uphold standards in higher welfare regions, advance fair market conditions, and help promote higher standards in low-welfare countries. Read our intro post here. If you have any questions about the position, please reach out to Rainer Kravets at rainer@animalpolicyinternational.org. If you know any people who might be interested, then please don't hesitate to share this post with them! Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9ubtY3G7jTnLBrZKg/job-post-api-is-looking-for-a-policy-manager-in-new-zealand
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SummaryAs part of the EA Strategy fortnight, I am sharing a reflection on my experience doing AI safety movement building over the last year, and why I am more excited about more efforts in the space compared to EA movement-building. This is mostly due to the relative success of AI safety groups compared to EA groups at universities with both . I expect many of the takeaways to extend beyond the university context. The main reasons AI safety field building seems more impactful are:Experimental data from universities with substantial effort put into EA and AI safety groups: Higher engagement overall, and from individuals with relevant expertise, interests, and skillsStronger object-level focus encourages skill and knowledge accumulation, offers better career capital, and lends itself to engagement from more knowledgeable and senior individuals (including graduate students and professors). Impartial/future-focused altruism not being a crux for many for working on AI safetyRecent developments increasing the salience of potential risks from transformative AI, and decreasing the appeal of the EA community/ideas. I also discuss some hesitations and counterarguments, of which the large decrease in neglectedness of existential risk from AI is most salient (and which I have not reflected too much on the implications of yet, though I still agree with the high-level takes this post argues for). Context/Why I am writing about thisI helped set up and run the Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative (CBAI) and the MIT AI Alignment group this past year. I also helped out with Harvard’s AI Safety team programming, along with some broader university AI safety programming (e.g. a retreat, two MLAB-inspired bootcamps, and a 3-week research program on AI strategy). Before this, I ran the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative and effective altruism student group and have supported many other university student groups.Why AI Safety Field Building over EA Community BuildingFrom my experiences over the past few months, it seems that AI safety field building is generally more impactful than EA movement building for people able to do either well, especially at the university level (under the assumption that reducing AI x-risk is probably the most effective way to do good, which I assume in this article). Here are some reasons for this:AI-alignment-branded outreach is empirically attracting many more students with relevant skill sets and expertise than EA-branded outreach at universities. Anecdotal evidence: At MIT, we received ~5x the number of applications for AI safety programming compared to EA programming, despite similar levels of outreach last year. This ratio was even higher when just considering applicants with relevant backgrounds and accomplishments. Around two dozen winners and top performers of international competitions (math/CS/science olympiads, research competitions) and students with significant research experience engaged with AI alignment programming, but very few engaged with EA programming. This phenomenon at MIT has also roughly been matched at Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, and I’d guess several other universities (though I think the relevant ratios are slightly lower than at MIT). It makes sense that things marketed with a specific cause area (e.g. AI rather than EA) are more likely to attract individuals highly skilled, [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YpADfSeSccsEkaetk/ai-safety-field-building-vs-ea-cb
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I spoke at EA Global London 2023 about longtermism and alternative proteins. Here’s the basic argument: 1) Meat production is a significant contributor to climate change, other environmental harms (pretty much all of them), food insecurity, antibiotic resistance, and pandemic risk - causing significant and immediate harm to billions of people. 2) All of these harms are likely to double in adverse impact (or more) by 2050 unless alternative proteins succeed. 3) Their X risk level is sufficiently high (Ord chart) that they warrant attention from longtermists. Especially for longtermists in policy or philanthropy, adding alt proteins to the portfolio impactful and tractable interventions that you support can allow you to do even more good in the world (a lot of it fairly immediate).In the talk, I cite this report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ director of global food security & director of climate and energy, as well as a report from ClimateWorks Foundation & the Global Methane Hub (1-pager w/r/t the points I made in the talk here). Below are the recording and transcript - comments welcomed.Here's a link to the slides from this talk.IntroductionThe observation is that we have been making meat in the same way for 12,000 years. Food is a technology. Making meat is a technology. The way we do it now is extraordinarily inefficient and comes with significant external costs that do indeed jeopardize our long-term future. This is Johan Rockström after the EAT-Lancet Commission called on the world to eat 90 percent less meat back in 2018 and 2019. He said, "Humanity now poses a threat to the stability of the planet. This requires nothing less than a new global agricultural revolution." That's what I'm going to be talking about, and I'm going to situate it in terms of effective altruism. There are five parts to the talk. The first one is that meat production has risen inexorably for many decades, and there is no sign of that growth slowing. The second is that our only strategy for changing this trajectory is support for alternative proteins - there's not a tractable plan B. The third point is that alternative proteins address multiple risks to long-term flourishing and they should be a priority for longtermists. I'm not going to try to convince you. They should be the priority - they're on par with AI risk or bioengineered pandemics. But I am going to try to convince you that, unless you are working for an organization that is focused on one thing, you should add alternative proteins to your portfolio if you are focused on longtermism. Fourth, I want to give you a sense of how GFI thinks about prioritization so that what we're doing as we expand is the highest marginal possible impact. Then we'll have some time for a discussion which Sim will lead us through. Meat Production has risen by 300% since 1961.The first observation is that, since 1961, global meat production has risen 300 percent. In China, it has skyrocketed by 1,500 percent. It's 15 times up since 1961, and [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ztLGLrWBbmmPgyZsb/longtermism-and-alternative-proteins
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CoI warning: I am friends with many (most really!) of the people who I talk about. I direct Riesgos Catastróficos Globales, one of the organisations I talk about. I also still feel anger around the unfair situation that my partner, Sandra Malagón, had to experience. I do not speak in representation of the community or its members, but in personal capacity as a fairly involved member. I haven’t been following the community developments very closely since January, so it is likely I have missed stuff!Last year I wrote a post celebrating the Spanish-speaking EA community and its achievements. A lot has happened since then, so I am writing here to organise my thoughts and provide some transparency on the state of the community.My perception of the Spanish-speaking community has changed a lot since. Back then it felt like an integrated whole, with direction and momentum. Now it feels more like an ecosystem of disjoint projects, some with a lot of momentum and others languishing.A major motivator of this is that we no longer have appointed coordinators who are steering the community. Sandra Malagón, who worked full-time as community coordinator, stepped down following a series of incidents where she felt pressured to work together with a community member she didn’t feel comfortable with [1]. She is now working instead on virtual programs for Spanish Speakers. The other part-time coordinator, Laura González, stepped down to focus on other projects.The effects of this can be seen in the activity stats of our shared workspace. Sandra left her position in early February, which matches the stop of activity growth:This is hard to separate from other causes like the FTX collapse and sex scandals in the community, so take it with a pinch of salt.Incidentally, if you are part of the Spanish-speaking community, I would like to apologise for the lack of communication about the status of the coordination team[2]. This situation was and still is very hard to navigate. ProjectsThe lack of direction does not mean that nothing has happened over the last few months. Here are a few notable projects and developments that have happened since I last posted. The EA México fellowship programThe fellowship program received +80 participants from all around the globe who stayed over different periods between November 2022 and January 2023.This program was, in my opinion, competently run. The organisation team, including Sandra Malagón, Hugo Ikta and Miguel Alvarado, showcased incredible attention to detail and problem solving skills. The fellowship was welcoming and diverse, and it is impressive that no major incidents resulted, given the scale of the program.The impact of the program was, however, curtailed by a series of factors. First, they had to deal with the FTX scandal and sex scandals in the international EA community. Inhabiting an EA co-living space at that time was not fun. Second, Sandra renounced her position as community coordinator at the end of the fellowship, and the EA Mexico coordinators had distanced themselves from community building. The original vision of the fellowship, as I understood it, was to act as [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sFoqCw6BnZmJNxFda/an-update-on-the-spanish-speaking-ea-community
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This post is a slightly belated contribution to the Strategy Fortnight. It represents my personal takes only; I’m not speaking on behalf of any organisation I’m involved with. For some context on how I’m now thinking about talking in public, I’ve made a shortform post here [link]. Thanks to the many people who provided comments on a draft of this post. Intro and OverviewHow does decision-making in EA work? How should it work? In particular: to what extent is decision-making in EA centralised, and to what extent should it be centralised? These are the questions I’m going to address in this post. In what follows, I’ll use “EA” to refer to the actual set of people, practices and institutions in the EA movement, rather than EA as an idea.My broad view is that EA as a whole is currently in the worst of both worlds with respect to centralisation. We get the downsides of appearing (to some) like a single entity without the benefits of tight coordination and clear decision-making structures that centralised entities have.It’s hard to know whether the right response to this is to become more centralised or less. In this post, I’m mainly hoping just to start a discussion of this issue, as it’s one that impacts a wide number of decisions in EA. [1] At a high level, though, I currently think that the balance of considerations tends to push in favour of decentralisation relative to where we are now. But centralisation isn’t a single spectrum, and we can break it down into sub-components. I’ll talk about this in more depth later in the post, but here are some ways in which I think EA should become more decentralised:Perception: At the very least, wider perception should reflect reality on how (de)centralised EA is. That means:Core organisations and people should communicate clearly (and repeatedly) about their roles and what they do and do not take ownership for. (I agree with Joey Savoie’s post, which he wrote independently of this one.)We should, insofar as we can, cultivate a diversity of EA-associated public figures.[Maybe] The EA Forum could be renamed. (Note that many decisions relating to CEA will wait until it has a new executive director).[Maybe] CEA could be renamed. (This is suggested by Kaleem here.)Funding: It’s hard to fix, but it would be great to have a greater diversity of funding sources. That means:Recruiting more large donors.Some significant donor or donors start a regranters program.More people pursue earning to give, or donate more (though I expect this “diversity of funding” consideration to have already been baked-in to most people’s decision-making on this). Luke Freeman has a moving essay about the continued need for funding here.Decision-making: Some projects that are currently housed within EV could spin out and become their own legal entities. The various different projects within EV have each been thinking through whether it makes sense for them to spin out. I expect around half of the projects will ultimately spin out over the coming year or two, which seems positive from my perspective.[Maybe] CEA could partly dissolve into sub-projects.Culture:We could [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DdSszj5NXk45MhQoq/decision-making-and-decentralisation-in-ea
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This is a linkpost for a new preprint, entitled "Building a Culture of Safety for AI: Perspectives and Challenges," and a brief explanation of the central points. Comments on the ideas in the post are welcome, but much of the content which clarifies the below is in the full manuscript.Safety culture in AI is going to be critical for many of the other promising initiatives for AI safety.If people don't care about safety, most safety measures turn into box-ticking. Companies that don't care avoid regulation, or render it useless. That's what happens when fraudulent companies are audited, or when car companies cheat on emissions tests.If people do care about safety, then audits, standards, and various risk-analysis tools can help get them there.Culture can transform industries, and norms about trying to be safe can be really powerful as a way to notice and discourage bad actors. However, there are lots of challenges to making such a culture.Safety culture usually requires agreement about the risks. We don't have that in AI generally.Culture depends on the operational environment.When people have risks reinforced by always being exposed to them, or personally being affected by failures, they pay more attention. In AI, most risks are rare, occur in the future, and/or affect others more than the people responsible.Most safety cultures are built around routines such as checklists and exercises that deal with current risks. Most AI risks aren't directly amenable to these approaches, so we can't reinforce culture with routines.Cultures are hard to change once they get started.AI gets cultural norms from academia, where few consider risks from their work, and there are norms of openness, and from the startup world, where companies generally want to "move fast and break things."AI companies aren't prioritizing safety over profits - unlike airlines, nuclear power operators, or hospitals, where there is a clear understanding that safety is a critical need, and everything will stop if there is a safety problem.Companies aren't hiring people who care about safety culture. But people build culture, and even if management wants to prioritize safety, lots of people who don't care won't add up to organizations that do care.We need something other than routinization to reinforce safety culture. Thankfully, there are some promising approaches, especially on the last point. These include identifying future risks proactively via various risk analysis methods, red-teaming, and audits. But as noted above, audits are most useful once safety culture is prioritized - though there is some promise in the near-term for audits to make lack of safety common knowledge.Next steps include building the repertoire of tools that will reduce risks and can be used to routinize and inculcate safety culture in the industry, and getting real buy-in from industry leaders for prioritizing safety.Thanks to Jonas Schuett, Shaun Ee, Simeon Campos, Tom David, Joseph Rogero, Sebastian Lodemann, and Yonaton Cale for helpful suggestions on the manuscript. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7tDuaRLS7FXYB4f2P/safety-culture-for-ai-is-important-but-isn-t-going-to-be
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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4491421
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On June 22nd, there was a “Munk Debate”, facilitated by the Canadian Aurea Foundation, on the question whether “AI research and development poses an existential threat” (you can watch it here, which I highly recommend). On stage were Yoshua Bengio and Max Tegmark as proponents and Yann LeCun and Melanie Mitchell as opponents of the central thesis. This seems like an excellent opportunity to compare their arguments and the effects they had on the audience, in particular because in the Munk Debate format, the audience gets to vote on the issue before and after the debate.The vote at the beginning revealed 67% of the audience being pro the existential threat hypothesis and 33% against it. Interestingly, it was also asked if the listeners were prepared to change their minds depending on how the debate went, which 92% answered with “yes”. The moderator later called this extraordinary and a possible record for the format. While this is of course not representative for the general public, it mirrors the high uncertainty that most ordinary people feel about AI and its impacts on our future.I am of course heavily biased. I would have counted myself among the 8% of people who were unwilling to change their minds, and indeed I’m still convinced that we need to take existential risks from AI very seriously. While Bengio and Tegmark have strong arguments from years of alignment research on their side, LeCun and Mitchell have often made weak claims in public. So I was convinced that Bengio and Tegmark would easily win the debate.However, when I skipped to the end of the video before watching it, there was an unpleasant surprise waiting for me: at the end of the debate, the audience had seemingly switched to a more skeptical view, with now only 61% accepting an existential threat from AI and 39% dismissing it.What went wrong? Had Max Tegmark and Yoshua Bengio really lost a debate against two people I hadn’t taken very seriously before? Had the whole debate somehow been biased against them? As it turned out, things were not so clear. At the end, the voting system apparently broke down, so the audience wasn’t able to vote on the spot. Instead, they were later asked for their vote by email. It is unknown how many people responded, so the difference can well be a random error. However, it does seem to me that LeCun and Mitchell, although clearly having far weaker arguments, came across quite convincing. A simple count of the hands of the people behind the stage, who can be seen in the video, during a hand vote results almost in a tie. The words of the moderator also seem to indicate that he couldn’t see a clear majority for one side in the audience, so the actual shift may have been even worse.In the following, I assume that Bengio and Tegmark were indeed not as convincing as I had hoped. It seems worthwhile to look at this in some more detail to learn [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HN4ECPh5bPykBgvT8/did-bengio-and-tegmark-lose-a-debate-about-ai-x-risk-against
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I love seeing cool visualizations (maps) of interesting intellectual fields. I’m also a big fan of making lists!Accordingly, I compiled a bunch of maps of fields that I thought were interesting. Please comment if you know of more such maps, and I’ll include them. Scott Alexander’s map of Effective Altruism (2020)mariekedev’s mindmap of EA organisations (2023)Hamish Doodles’ aisafety.world (2023)On a side note, I would be very keen for someone to create a similar map of relevant organizations in the biosecurity & pandemic preparedness space. I plan to post a minimum viable product (bullet point list) soon. James Lin’s map of biosecurity interventions (2022)Scott Alexander’s map of the rationality community (2014)Dan Elton’s map of progress studies (2021)Ada Nguyen’s map of the Longevity Biotech Landscape (2023)Nadia Asparouhova’s map of climate tribes (2022)Samuel Arbesman’s Catalog of New Types of Research Organizations (2023)This one is more of a long list, but I thought it was very interesting nonetheless!Honorable mentionsThese are other mapping efforts that met my "I'm curious about it" but not my "This is super interesting" bar. Some of them also seem outdated. xkcd’s map of online communities (2010)Julia Galef’s map of the Bay Area memespace (2013)Joe Lightfoot’s The Liminal Web: Mapping An Emergent Subculture Of Sensemakers, Meta-Theorists & Systems Poets (2021 & updated in 2023)Shoutout to Rival Voices, who created a similar-ish collection of maps (2023), and Nadia Asparouhova, who wrote a more meta-level post about Mapping digital worlds (2023). Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dAuaHKnH6CsaH8ecg/map-of-maps-of-interesting-fields
Linkpost URL:
https://glozematrix.substack.com/p/map-of-maps-of-interesting-fields
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Epistemic Status: This is a subject I've been casually thinking about for a while, but I wrote this document fairly quickly. Take this with a big grain of salt. This is written in a personal capacity.A lot of EA, especially in meta and longtermism, is made up of small organizations and independent researchers. This provides some benefits, but I think the downsides are substantial and often unappreciated. More clearly:EA funding mostly comes from a very few funders, but it goes to a mass of small organizations. My impression is that this is an unusual combination.I think that there are a lot of important downsides to having things split up into a bunch of small nonprofits.I'm suspicious of many of the reasons for having small organizations that I've come across. There might well still be good reasons I haven't heard or that haven't been suggested.I suggest some potential changes we could make to try to get some of the best incremental tradeoffs.DownsidesLow Management FlexibilityIf you want to quickly create a new project in a sizeable organization, you can pull people from existing teams. This requires upper management but is normal for said management. On the other hand, if you instead have a bunch of tiny independent organizations, your options are much more limited. Managers of tiny organizations can be near-impossible to move around because many of them own key funding relationships. Pulling together employees from different organizations is a pain, as no one has the authority to directly do this. The best you can do is slowly encourage people to join said new project.Moving people around is crucial for startups and tech firms. The first version Amazon Prime was made in under two months, in large part because Jeff Bezos was able to rapidly deploy the right people to it. At other tech companies, some amounts of regularly rotating team members is considered healthy. Strong software engineers get to work on many projects and people.Small nonprofit teams with locked-in mission statements are the opposite of this. This rigidness could be good for donors with little trust, but it comes at a substantial cost of flexibility.I’ve seen several projects in EA come up that could use rapid labor. Funding rounds seem particularly labor-intensive. It often seems to me like it should be possible to pull trusted people from existing organizations for a few weeks or months, but doing so is awkward because they’re formally part of separate organizations with specific mission statements and funding agreements.A major thing that managers at sizeable organizations do is size up requests for labor changes. The really good requests (with good managers) get quickly moved forward, and the bad ones are shot down. This is hard to do without clear, able, and available authorities.Low Employee FlexibilityEmployees that join small organizations with narrow missions can be assured that they will work on those missions. But if they ever want to try working with a different team or project, even just for a few months, the only option is often that [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P55P4YJoncfQmZ2RR/downsides-of-small-organizations-in-ea
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TL;DR: Spanish-Speaking Introduction to Effective Altruism covering key concepts like EA itself, 80,000 Hours, Longtermism, and the ITN Framework.Message to the English-Speaking Community (Mensaje para la comunidad angloparlante):Hey everyone!I'm David, a 21-year-old Computer Science student at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). I recently delivered an introductory talk on Effective Altruism (EA), drawing inspiration from Ajeya Cotra's style and targeting young adults.During the talk, I covered various important concepts such as Effective Altruism itself, the idea of 80,000 hours, Longtermism, and the ITN Framework (translated into Spanish), after sharing my personal journey of discovering these concepts and why they hold significance for me.As part of my ongoing efforts to address the lack of Spanish content on the EA Forum, I am sharing a link to the talk and the accompanying transcript in the form of an article.Spanish, being the second most widely spoken language in the world and extensively used on the internet, deserves greater representation within the EA community. My hope is that this initiative will help bridge the gap and make EA concepts more accessible to Spanish speakers.I.Hola, soy David, tengo 21 años y estudio Computación en la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Hoy, quiero hablarles sobre un concepto que transformó radicalmente mi vida: el Altruismo Eficaz. El Altruismo Eficaz es, básicamente, un proyecto que tiene como objetivo encontrar las mejores formas de ayudar a los demás y ponerlas en práctica.Es tanto un campo de investigación que busca identificar los problemas más urgentes del mundo y las mejores soluciones para ellos, como una comunidad práctica que busca utilizar esos hallazgos para hacer el bien.Pero… para que entiendan por qué es tan importante para mí, y poder profundizar en esto, necesito antes contarles un poco de mi historia:Bueno, era marzo de 2020, cuando habiendo cumplido 18 años, termino la secundaria. El mismo mes me quedo sin hogar justo antes de empezar la universidad, cuando mi padre me echa de la habitación que compartíamos en una vivienda colectiva. Terminé siendo hospedado en la casa de un amigo y comencé a buscar empleo.Eran tiempos difíciles, de pandemia, la actividad económica había quedado paralizada. Por suerte, mala y buena, me contratan como empleado de limpieza en un HospitalEn mi tiempo trabajando ahí, pude ser testigo de lo colapsado que se encontraba el sistema sanitario. Veía a personas ansiosas esperando en la guardia, pacientes sufriendo de enfermedades graves, y los trabajadores de la salud que se encargaban de tratarlos, completamente exhaustos. Con la emergencia sanitaria sumándose al caos, era un ambiente bastante estresante, incluso aterrador.En ese ambiente yo trabajaba. Y a la vuelta, iba a un comedor comunitario, que maneja una iglesia en el barrio de Constitución, para pedir comida. Es ahí, donde me doy cuenta de que el hambre, frío, y desesperación, que yo sentía, era cotidiano para una parte significativa de nuestra sociedad.Durante esta época, hubo noches en las que simplemente lloraba, sintiéndome completamente impotente. No entendía cómo el mundo podía llegar a ser tan injusto, y la gente capaz de ayudar, con recursos de sobra, [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LxBc5cgwZRhQEuPkA/presentacion-introductoria-al-altruismo-eficaz
Linkpost URL:
https://youtu.be/A6HqJJpEnhM
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StatusWhile this is part of EA Strategy Fortnight, my intention is to focus more on what effective altruism did well, rather than what it should do. At the same time, my hope would be that the post provides the community with at least some valuable context to the discussions about the path forward.This post will be very subjective and a lot less thought-through than what I am usually comfortable sharing, although built on ~13 years of experience in the field. Some details may be off, for example by memory distortion or indirect testimonies. Nevertheless, it’s truthful to my internal models – when I walk and talk to my dog about this kind of stuff, you can expect my mind to go in the same direction as this post.Kisiel, my co-author, that prefer to stay as a lurker.ContextRecently, there has been a lot of attention directed at effective altruism. Some was external, but, from my perspective, most of it came from within the movement. My interpretation was that at least a portion of it was built on feelings of anxiety, doubt, and maybe some anger or fear. Of course, a lot of concerns seemed to me legitimized by what was happening or what we were discovering.In some way, I was worried about the community I identify as part of, but at the same time, there was this feeling of appreciation that we can go together through a crisis. It’s a lesson for a young movement, and experience is invaluable. Just like it’s better to learn hard lessons about life as a teenager than an adult, of course ideally with not much harm involved.The energy spent on inward focus felt encouraging, even though I disagreed with a chunk of the opinions. After all, some of the values of effective altruism I’m the most optimistic about are openness to criticism, intellectual humility, and truth-seeking. But the more external and internal takes I was reading, the more something seemed off. Something was missing.It felt one-sided. There was almost no mention of successes and wins – some appreciation of what this very young and weird movement managed to achieve in such a short period of time. Maybe I shouldn’t expect this in adversarial pieces about EA, and maybe it was implied when people were making criticism internally, but it still didn’t feel fully right to me.It felt like we all take effective altruism for granted. There was not much gratitude in the air.Maybe one can argue that EA hasn’t done much. While I have my strong intuitions on the counterfactual impact of EA in many areas, in the end I don’t feel fully qualified here, so I would prefer to defer. Yet, I’m confident that there is at least one success we should celebrate, and it’s very much absent from the discourse – making historical progress for animals.Animal advocate’s lens on effective altruismThis is my take on the short path of effective altruism’s impact on animals. Please note that I came from the part of [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GCaRhu84NuCdBiRz8/ea-s-success-no-one-cares-about
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Epistemic status: This post is an edited version of an informal memo I wrote several months ago. I adapted it for the forum at the prompting of EA strategy fortnight. At the time of writing I conceived of its value as mostly in laying out considerations / trying to structure a conversation that felt a bit messy to me at the time, though I do give some of my personal takes too.I went back and forth a decent amount about whether to post this - I'm not sure about a lot of it. But some people I showed it to thought it would be good to post, and it feels like it's in the spirit of EA strategy fortnight to have a lower bar for posting, so I'm going for it.Overall takeSome people argue that the effective altruism community should focus more of its resources on building cause-specific fields (such as AI safety, biosecurity, global health, and farmed animal welfare), and less on effective altruism community building per se. I take the latter to mean something like: community building around the basic ideas/principles, and which invests in particular causes always with a more tentative attitude of "we're doing this only insofar as/while we're convinced this is actually the way to do the most good." (I'll call this "EA per se" for the rest of the post.)I think there are reasons for some shift in this direction. But I also have some resistance to some of the arguments I think people have for it.My guess is that Allocating some resources from "EA per se" to field-specific development will be an overall good thing, but My best guess (not confident) is that a modest reallocation is warranted, andI worry some reasons for reallocation are overrated.In this post I'll Articulate the reasons I think people have for favouring shifting resources in this way (just below), and give my takes on them (this will doubtless miss some reasons).Explain some reasons in favour of continuing (substantial) support for EA per se. Reasons I think people might have for a shift away from EA per se, and my quick takes on them1. The reason: The EA brand is (maybe) heavily damaged post FTX — making building EA per se less tractable and less valuable because getting involved in EA per se now has bigger costs.My take: I think how strong this is basically depends on how people perceive EA now post-FTX, and I'm not convinced that the public feels as badly about it as some other people seem to think. I think it's hard to infer how people think about EA just by looking at headlines or Twitter coverage about it over the course of a few months. My impression is that lots of people are still learning about EA and finding it intuitively appealing, and I think it's unclear how much this has changed on net post-FTX. Also, I think EA per se has a lot to contribute to the conversation about AI risk — and was talking about it before AI concern became mainstream — so [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CEtKAP5Gr7QrTXHRW/on-focusing-resources-more-on-particular-fields-vs-ea-per-se
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As part of 'strategy fortnight' (and in part inspired by this post) I decided to write this short post clarifying the relationship, as I see it[4], between 80,000 Hours and the EA community. I chose these questions because I thought there might be some people who care about the answers and who would want to know what (someone on the leadership team at) 80,000 Hours would say.
Is 80,000 Hours's mission to build the EA community?
No — our aim is to help people have careers with a lot of social impact. If the EA community didn't exist, we could still pursue our mission. However, we count ourselves as part of the EA community in part because we think it's pretty great. It has flaws, and we don't blanket recommend getting involved to our readers (a recommendation we feel better about making widely is to get involved in some kind of community that shares your aims). But we think the EA community does do a lot to help people (including us) figure out how to have a big positive impact, think through options carefully, and work together to make projects happen. For that reason, we do say we think learning about and getting involved in the EA community could be a great idea for many of our readers. And we think building the EA community can be a way to have a high-impact career, so we list articles focused on it high up on our problem profiles page and among our career reviews. Both of these are ways in which we do contribute substantially to building the effective altruism community. We think this is one of the ways we've had a positive impact over the years, so we do continue to put energy into this route to value (more on this below). But doing so is ultimately about helping the individuals we are writing for to increase their ability to have a positive impact by getting involved, rather than to benefit the community per se. In other words, helping grow the ea community is part of our strategy for pursuing our mission of helping people have high-impact careers.[fn 3]
Does 80,000 Hours seek to provide "career advice for effective altruists"?
Somewhat, but not mostly, and it would feel misleading to put it that way. 80,000 Hours focuses on helping a group much larger than the (current) EA community have higher impact careers. For example, we estimate the size of the group we are trying to reach with the website to be ~100k people — which is around 10x larger than the EA community. (For context, we currently get in the range of 4M visitors to the website a year, and have 300k newsletter subscribers.) Some of the people in our audience are part of the EA community already, but they're a minority. One reason we focus so broadly is that we are trying to optimise the marginal counterfactual impact of our efforts. This often translates into trying to focus on [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iCDcJdqqmBa9QrEHv/faq-on-the-relationship-between-80-000-hours-and-the
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Better governance would not necessarily have prevented prominent scandals in EA. However, stronger accountability and governance mechanisms would almost certainly have mitigated them, and possibly even prevented them entirely. Governance standards are generally quite poor in EA. If you audited EA organisations using a checklist of things like whistleblowing protections, managing conflicts of interest, Board function and Board composition, I think most Boards would be 'amber' or 'red' against wider governance norms. This unnecessarily increases the risk of future scandals. Unless this is reformed, we should expect more scandals that hurt people, organisations and the community, and which prevent us achieving the goals of the EA community. One of the easiest fixes here is Board composition. You want a Board that has:
enough members that it can continue to function well if ~2 people are unavailable for some reason (therefore 6-8 people, given that some members may be conflicted on some issues) at least some people with relevant expertise, particularly the ability to interpret internal financial reports; to manage, assess and hold accountable the CEO; and to create strong governance processes a mixture of inside and outside views of the organisation (and the EA community) to reduce blind spots
These things are much less likely to be achieved if the recruitment process for Boards is entirely done via personal networks and direct, unconditional invitations to join the Board. This approach is especially likely to fail tests two and three. Accordingly, I think it's really important that there have been at least three open calls for trustee recruitment this year. Rethink Priorities led the way in January, and One for the World (my organisation) and EVF are conducting open searches at the moment. This is a significant positive step and should become a norm. It can also be really inspiring. In our latest round, we had more than 20 people who met our bar for 'would be a values-aligned, valuable Board member'. Also, some of them were so impressive that we wouldn't have approached them directly, believing that they would be unlikely to accept. Epistemic status: reasonably high. There are well-established governance norms based on more than a century of real-world experience; it seems highly unlikely that EA is exempt from these.
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Q2aLn36Cq8HyciLqk/open-board-recruitment-should-be-a-norm
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TL;DR: For now, we're going to be promoting EA as a place for intellectual exploration, incredible research, and real-world impact and innovation.These are my thoughts, but Emma Richter has been closely involved with developing them.This post is intended as a very overdue introduction to CEA’s communications team, our goals, and what we’re currently working on/planning to work on.I started at CEA as head of communications in September 2022. My position was a new one: as I understand it, various EA stakeholders were concerned that EA communications had fallen into a diffusion of responsibility. Though everyone in this ecosystem wanted it to go well, no one explicitly managed it. I was therefore hired with the remit of trying to fix this. Emma Richter joined the team as a contractor in December and became a permanent member of the team in March. We’ve also worked with a variety of external advisors, most notably Mike Levine at TSD Communications.Our team has two main goals. The first is to help look after the EA brand. That means, broadly, that we want the outside world to have an accurate, and positive impression of effective altruism and the value created by this ecosystem. The second, more nebulous goal, is to help the EA ecosystem better use communications to achieve various object-level goals. This means things like “helping to publicise a report on effective giving”, or “advocating for AI safety in the press”. As communications capacity grows across the EA ecosystem, I expect this goal to become less of a priority for us — but for now I think we have expertise that can be used to make a big difference in this way.With that in mind, here’s how we’re thinking about things at the moment.I’ll start with what’s going on in the world. There are a few particularly salient things I’m tracking:On the EA brand:Negative attention on EA has significantly died down.We expect it to flare back up somewhat this autumn, around SBF’s trial and various book releases, though probably not to the level that it was in late 2022.On net, there doesn’t appear to be a hit to the EA brand from FTX (see here for various data). Among those who have heard of both, though, there may have been a hit — and I suspect that group of people would include important subgroups like journalists and politicians.There is uncertainty about what people want EA (the brand, the ecosystem and/or the community) to be.Within CEA, our new executive director might make fairly radical changes (though they may also keep things quite similar).From the job announcement: “One thing to highlight is that we are both open to and enthusiastic about candidates who want to pursue significant changes to CEA. This might include: Spinning off or shutting down programs, or starting new programs; Focusing on specific cause areas, or on promoting general EA principles; Trying to build something more like a mass movement or trying to be more selective and focused; Significant staffing changes; Changing CEA’s name.There is increased interest [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mFGZtPKTjqrfeHHsH/how-cea-s-communications-team-is-thinking-about-ea
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SummaryOn June 2nd-June 3rd 2023, Rethink Priorities conducted an online poll of US adults, to assess their views regarding a recent open statement from the Center for AI Safety (CAIS). The statement, which has been signed by a number of prominent figures in the AI industry and AI research communities, as well as other public figures, was:“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”The goal of this poll was to determine the degree to which the American public’s views of AI risk align with this statement. The poll covered opinions regarding[1]:Agreement/disagreement with the CAIS open statementSupport for/opposition to the CAIS open statementWorry about negative effects of AIPerceived likelihood of human extinction from AI by the year 2100Our population estimates reflect the responses of 2407 US adults, poststratified to be representative of the US population.[2] See the Methodology section of the Appendix for more information on sampling and estimation procedures.Key findingsAttitudes towards the CAIS statement were largely positive. A majority of the population supports (58%) and agrees with (59%) the CAIS statement, relative to 22% opposition and 26% disagreement.Worry about AI remains low. We estimate that most (68%) US adults would say that, at most, they only worry a little bit in their daily lives about the possible negative effects of AI on their lives or society more broadly. This is similar to our estimate in April (where 71% were estimated to have this level of worry).The public estimates of the chance of extinction from AI are highly skewed, with the most common estimate around 1%, but substantially higher medians and means. We estimate that half the population would give a probability below 15%, and half would give a probability above 15%. The most common response is expected to be around 1%, with 13% of people saying there is no chance. However, the mean estimate for the chance of extinction from AI by 2100 is quite high, at 26%, owing to a long tail of people giving higher ratings. It should be noted that just because respondents provided ratings in the form of probabilities, it does not mean they have a full grasp of the exact likelihoods their ratings imply.Attitudes towards the CAIS statementRespondents were presented with the CAIS statement on AI risk, and asked to indicate both the extent to which they agreed/disagreed with it, and the extent to which they supported/opposed it.[3] We estimate that the US population broadly agrees with (59%) and supports (58%) the statement. Disagreement (26%) and opposition (22%) were relatively low, and sizable proportions of people remained neutral (12% and 18% for agreement and support formats, respectively).It is important to note that agreement with or support of this statement may not translate to agreement with or support of more specific policies geared towards actually making AI risk a comparable priority to pandemics or nuclear weapons. People may also support certain concrete actions that serve to mitigate AI risk despite not agreeing that it is of comparable concern to pandemics or nuclear [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Rg7h7G3KTvaYEtL55/us-public-perception-of-cais-statement-and-the-risk-of
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Getting rejected from jobs can be crushing — but learning how to deal with rejection productively is an incredibly valuable skill. And hearing others' rejection stories can make us feel less alone and judged, and generally help us orient toward rejection in more productive ways. Let's use this thread to help each other with this. If you're up for it, comment and share:Rejection stories you might haveAny lessons you've learned for coping with rejectionWhat has helped in the pastYou can also message Lizka to share rejections that she will anonymize and add to the comments, or you can omit some details or just share tips without sharing the rejection stories themselves.Sharing rejections like this can be hard. Don't force yourself to do it if it stresses you out. And if you're commenting on this post, please remember to be kind. Luisa's experience — shared in the 80,000 Hours newsletterRejection was the topic of this week's 80,000 Hours newsletter, where Luisa shared a lot about her experience and how she's learned to cope with it. (That prompted this thread!) She wrote the following:I've been rejected many, many times. In 2015, I applied to ten PhD programs and was rejected from nine. After doing a summer internship with GiveWell in 2016, I wasn't offered a full-time role. In 2017, I was rejected by J-PAL, IDinsight, and Founders Pledge (among others). Around the same time, I was so afraid of being rejected by Open Philanthropy, I dropped out of their hiring round.I now have what I consider a dream job at 80,000 Hours: I get to host a podcast about the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them. But before getting a job offer from 80,000 Hours in 2020, I got rejected by them for a role in 2018. That rejection hurt the most.I still remember compulsively checking my phone after my work trial to see if 80,000 Hours had made me an offer. And I still remember waking up at 5:00 AM, checking my email, and finding the kind and well-written — but devastating — rejection: "Unfortunately we don't think the role is the right fit right now."And I remember being so sad that I took a five-hour bus ride to stay with a friend so I wouldn't have to be alone. After a few days of wallowing, I re-read the rejection email and noticed a lot of specific feedback — and a promising path forward."We're optimistic about your career in global prioritisation research and think you should stay in the area and build experience," they said. "We're not going anywhere, and could be a good career transition for you further down the line."I took their advice and accepted a job offer at Rethink Priorities, which also does global priorities research. And a year and a half later, 80,000 Hours invited me to apply for a job again.It's hard to say what would've happened had I not opened myself to rejection in 2018, but it seems possible I'd be in a pretty different [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AXCnNJTQXeAY4jnsw/rejection-thread-stories-and-tips
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Hi! I co-lead Rethink Priorities’ AI Governance & Strategy (AIGS) team. At the suggestion of Ben West, I’m providing an update on our team. Caveats:This was quickly written and omits most of the reasoning for our choices, because that was all I had time to write and that seemed better than not providing an update at all. This post may not reflect the views of all members of the team, and doesn’t represent RP as an organization.The areas we work in are evolving rapidly, so our strategy and projects are as well. Comments and DMs are welcome, though I can’t guarantee a rapid or detailed reply. Summary The AIGS team works to reduce catastrophic risks related to AI by conducting research and strengthening the field of AI governance. We aim to bridge the technical and policy worlds, and we now focus on short, rapid-turnaround outputs and briefings. [read more]Our four key workstreams are compute governance, China, lab governance, and US regulations. [read more]We list some of our ongoing or completed projects. [read more]Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to suggest a project; if you’re open to sharing feedback, expertise, or connections with us; or if you or someone you know might be interested in working with or funding us. [read more]I summarize a few lessons learned and recent updates. [read more]Who we are Rethink Priorities’ AI Governance & Strategy team works to reduce catastrophic risks related to development & deployment of AI systems. We do this by producing research that grounds concrete recommendations in strategic considerations, and by strengthening coordination and talent pipelines across the AI governance field.We combine the intellectual independence and nonpartisanship of a think tank with the flexibility and responsiveness of a consultancy. Our work is funded solely by foundations and independent donors, giving us the freedom to pursue important questions without bias. We’re always on the lookout for unexplored high-value research questions–feel free to pitch us!We aim to bridge the technical and policy worlds, with expertise on foundation models and the hardware underpinning them. We focus on short, rapid-turnaround outputs and briefings, but also produce longer reports. Much of our work is nonpublic, but may be shareable on request.We have 11 staff, listed here. You can contact any of us at firstname@rethinkpriorities.orgOur four workstreams We recently narrowed down to four focus areas, each of which has a 1-3 person subteam working on it. Below we summarize these workstreams and link to docs that provide further information on each (e.g., about ongoing projects, public outputs, and stakeholders and paths to impact). Compute governance: This workstream will focus on establishing a firmer empirical and theoretical grounding for the fledgling field of compute governance, informing ongoing policy processes and debates, and developing more concrete technical and policy proposals. In particular, we will focus on understanding the impact of existing compute-related US export controls, and researching what changes to them may be feasible and beneficial. This workstream consists of Onni Aarne and Erich Grunewald, and we’re currently hiring a third member.China: This workstream’s mission is to improve decisions at the intersection of AI governance and China. We are interested in both [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BSmMok4r5ocnD5dqT/rp-s-ai-governance-and-strategy-team-june-2023-interim-1
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Upside Foods and Good Meat, two companies that make what they call “cultivated chicken,” said Wednesday that they have gotten approval from the US Department of Agriculture to start producing their cell-based proteins.Good Meat, which is owned by plant-based egg substitute maker Eat Just, said that production is starting immediately. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sPnNyG79CcSZq9avo/lab-grown-meat-is-cleared-for-sale-in-the-united-states
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The post contains a reflection on our journey as co-founders of Rethink Priorities. We are Peter Wildeford and Marcus A. Davis. In 2017, we were at a crossroads.We had been working on creating new global health and development interventions, co-founding an organization that used text message reminders to encourage new parents in India to get their children vaccinated.However, we felt there was potentially more value in creating an organization that would help tackle important questions within cause and intervention prioritization. We were convinced that farmed and wild animal welfare were very important, but we didn’t know which approaches to helping those animals would be impactful. Hits-based giving seemed like an important idea, but we were unsure how to empirically compare that type of approach to the mostly higher-certainty outcomes available from funding GiveWell’s top charities.So, we chose to create a research organization. Our aim was to take the large amount of evidence base and strong approaches used to understand global health interventions and apply them to other neglected cause areas, such as animal welfare and reducing risks posed by unprecedented new technologies like AI. We wanted to identify neglected interventions and do the research needed to make them happen.~~~Five years later, Rethink Priorities is now a research and implementation group that works with foundations and impact-focused non-profits to identify pressing opportunities to make the world better, figures out strategies for working on those problems, and does that work.Reflecting on everything the organization has accomplished and everything we want to happen in the next five years, we’re proud of a lot of the work our team has done.For example, we went from being unsure if invertebrates were capable of suffering to researching the issue and establishing invertebrate welfare as a proposition worth taking seriously. Following through, we helped create some of the first groups in the effective animal advocacy space working on interventions targeting invertebrates. Our team did the deep philosophical work and the practical research needed to establish specific interventions, and we incubated groups to implement them.Building on this work, our ambitious Moral Weight Project improved our understanding of both capacity for welfare and intensity of valenced experiences across species, and the moral implications of those possible differences. By doing so, the Moral Weight Project laid the foundation for cross-animal species cost-effectiveness analyses that inform important decisions regarding how many resources grantmakers and organizations should tentatively allocate towards helping each of these species.We have also produced dozens of in-depth research pieces. Our global health and development team, alone, has produced 23 reports commissioned by Open Philanthropy that increased the scope of impactful interventions considered in their global health and development portfolio. This work has influenced decisions directing millions of dollars towards the most effective interventions.Our survey and data analysis team also worked closely with more than a dozen groups in EA including the Centre for Effective Altruism, Open Philanthropy, 80,000 Hours, and 1 Day Sooner to help them fine-tune their messaging, improve their advertising, and have better data analysis for their impact tracking.RP has provided [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kP95dWZJR5qKwdThA/five-years-of-rethink-priorities-what-we-ve-learned
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This is a blog post, not a research report, meaning it was produced quickly and is not to Rethink Priorities’ typical standards of substantiveness and careful checking for accuracy.Super quick summaryThis is a list of twenty projects that we (Rethink Priorities’ Existential Security Team) think might be especially promising projects for reducing existential risk, based on our very preliminary and high-level research to identify and compare projects.You can see an overview of the full list here. Here are five ideas we (tentatively) think seem especially promising:Improving info/cybersec at top AI labsAI lab coordinationField building for AI policyFacilitating people’s transition from AI capabilities research to AI safety researchFinding market opportunities for biodefence-relevant technologiesIntroductionWhat is this list?This is a list of projects that we (the Existential Security Team at Rethink Priorities) think are plausible candidates for being top projects for substantially reducing existential risk.The list was generated based on a wide search (resulting in an initial list of around 300 ideas, most of which we did not come up with ourselves[1]) and a shallow, high-level prioritization process (spending between a few minutes and an hour per idea). The process took about 100 total hours of work, spread across three researchers. More details on our research process can be found in the appendix. Note that some of the ideas we considered most promising were excluded from this list due to being confidential, sensitive or particularly high-risk.We’re planning to prioritize projects on this list (as well as other non-public ideas) for further research, as candidates for projects we might eventually incubate. We’re planning to focus exclusively on projects aiming to reduce AI existential risk in 2023 but have included project ideas in other cause areas on this list as we still think those ideas are promising and would be excited about others working on them. More on our team’s strategy here.We’d be potentially excited about others researching, pursuing and supporting the projects on this list, although we don't think this is a be-all-end-all list of promising existential-risk-reducing projects and there are important limitations to this list (see “Key limitations of this list”).Why are we sharing this list and who is it for?By sharing this list, we’re hoping to:Give a sense of what kinds of projects we’re considering incubating and be transparent about our research process and results.Provide inspiration for projects others could consider working on.Contribute to community discussion about existential security entrepreneurship – we’re excited to receive feedback on the list, additional project suggestions, and information about the project areas we highlight (for example, existing projects we may have missed, top ideas not on this list, or reasons that some of our ideas may be worse than we think).You might be interested in looking at this list if you’re:Considering being a founder or early employee of a new project. This list can give you some inspiration for potential project areas to look into. If you’re interested in being a (co-)founder or early employee for one of the projects on this list, feel free to reach out to Marie Buhl [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AJwuMw7ddcKQNFLcR/concrete-projects-for-reducing-existential-risk
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Some months ago, Rethink Priorities announced its interdisciplinary Worldview Investigation Team (WIT). Now, we’re pleased to introduce the team’s members:Bob Fischer is a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, and the Director of the Society for the Study of Ethics & Animals. Before leading WIT, he ran RP’s Moral Weight Project.Laura Duffy is an Executive Research Coordinator for Co-CEO Marcus Davis and works on the Worldview Investigations Project. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Statistics and co-facilitated UChicago Effective Altruism’s Introductory Fellowship.Arvo Muñoz Morán is a Quantitative Researcher working on the Worldview Investigations Team at Rethink Priorities and a research assistant at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute. Before that, he was a Research Analyst at the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and earned an MPhil in Economics from Oxford. His background is in mathematics and philosophy.Hayley Clatterbuck is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published on topics in probability, evolutionary biology, and animal minds. Derek Shiller is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He has a PhD in philosophy and has written on topics in metaethics, consciousness, and the philosophy of probability. Before joining Rethink Priorities, Derek worked as the lead web developer for The Humane League.David Bernard is a Quantitative Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He will soon complete his PhD in economics at the Paris School of Economics, where his research focuses on forecasting and causal inference in the short and long-run. He was a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley and a Global Priorities fellow at the Global Priorities Institute. Over the next few months, the team will be working on cause prioritization—a topic that raises hard normative, metanormative, decision-theoretic, and empirical issues. We aren’t going to resolve them anytime soon. So, we need to decide how to navigate a sea of open questions. In part, this involves making our assumptions explicit, producing the best models we can, and then conducting sensitivity analyses to determine both how robust our models are to uncertainty and where the value of information lies.Accordingly, WIT’s goal is to make several contributions to the broader conversation about global priorities. Among the planned contributions, you can expect:A cross-cause cost-effectiveness model. This tool will allow users to compare interventions like corporate animal welfare campaigns with work on AI safety, the Against Malaria Foundation with attempts to reduce the risk of nuclear war, biosecurity projects with community building, and so on. We’ve been working on a draft of this model in recent months and we recently hired two programmers to accelerate its public release. While this tool won’t resolve all disputes about resource allocation, we hope it will help the community reason more transparently about these issues.Surveys of key stakeholders about the inputs to the model. Many people have thought long and hard about how much x-risk certain interventions can reduce, the relative importance of improving human and [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kSrjdtazFhkwwLuK8/rethink-priorities-worldview-investigation-team
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On May 11, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a 2018 California law, Proposition 12, which banned the sale of certain animal products that did not meet minimum welfare standards. Especially now that such ballot initiatives have withstood legal challenges, a relevant question we might ask is: how cost-effective were initiatives like Proposition 12 at reducing farmed animal suffering? Below is the executive summary of a report I wrote for Rethink Priorities analyzing the cost-effectiveness of not just Proposition 12, but also three other historical animal welfare ballot initiatives in the United States. In this report, I also compared the results to the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns. The full report is viewable here with a detailed discussion of the methodology and results. Executive SummaryKey ResultsIn this report, I estimated the impact and cost-effectiveness of four historical United States ballot initiatives that either restricted the use of common animal confinement methods (including extremely confining stalls and tethering for veal calves, extremely confining gestation crates for breeding sows, and conventional cages for egg-laying hens), set minimum per-animal space requirements, and/or mandated cage-free systems for egg-laying hens.[1] These initiatives are Arizona Proposition 204 (2006), California Proposition 2 (2008), Massachusetts Question 3 (2016), and California Proposition 12 (2018).The three metrics of impact I estimated were: The number of years of improved animal welfare produced per dollar spent passing the initiatives for three animal types (veal calves, breeding sows, and egg-laying hens);The estimated years of disabling pain-equivalent suffering[2] alleviated per dollar for veal calves, breeding sows, and egg-laying hens; and The relative years of improved hen welfare and disabling pain-equivalent suffering avoided per dollar per year of counterfactual impact compared to corporate cage-free campaigns,[3] rated using an equivalent metric. I estimated these metrics by building a Monte Carlo model in Causal that used data on state population sizes, per-capita animal product consumption, state animal populations, and campaign fundraising amounts to estimate the number of animals whose quality of life was improved over the first four years in which the ballot initiatives were in place. In addition, for egg-laying hens specifically, I used data from the Welfare Footprint Project to estimate the years of suffering alleviated by the transition away from conventional cages for the ballot initiatives that included egg-laying hens (Welfare Footprint Project). Finally, I compared the per-dollar years of improved welfare generated and suffering avoided by ballot initiatives to that accomplished by corporate campaigns, using cost-effectiveness estimates from Saulius Šimčikas, the estimated number of animals whose lives were improved, and the Welfare Footprint data.The key takeaways are:Among all species, about 5.0 years of animal life were improved per dollar spent (with a 90-percentile range between 3.9 and 6.4 years per dollar). This translates into approximately 0.10 years of suffering avoided per dollar spent on all four ballot initiatives, with a 90-percentile range from 0.05 years per dollar to 0.14 years per dollar.Helping egg-laying hens is, by far, the most impactful farmed animal welfare reform.Nearly all (about 99%) of the reductions in farmed-animal suffering by these four initiatives can be attributed to bans on battery [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EEMpNRJK5qqCw6zqH/a-cost-effectiveness-analysis-of-historical-farmed-animal
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This is a linkpost for https://dawnwatch.com/petersingeressay/. There is some criticism of Singer’s approach to animal welfare; effective altruism; appropriating women’s voices; and discussion of a sexual harassment claim. This was a hard read, and CEA/EV haven’t investigated these claims, but I thought it was of interest to the community to share. If you’d like to talk through any concerns about this, or other similar situations, you can contact me or other members of the Community Health Team via our form. Here are some resources that may be usefulhttps://www.respectatwork.gov.au/ https://leanin.org/sexual-harassment/individuals https://www.rainn.org/ https://247sexualabusesupport.org.uk/ Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vaDxspBZ37NoEfgMx/linkpost-dawnwatch-peter-singer-is-not-animal-liberation-now
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The Legal Priorities Project (LPP) is excited to announce that applications for our Summer Research Fellowship in Law & AI 2023 are now open. For 8–12 weeks, participants will work with researchers at LPP on how the law can help to mitigate existential risks from artificial intelligence. Fellows will receive a stipend of $10,000.If you are interested in carrying out research in this field and are considering using your career to mitigate existential risks, particularly those from AI, we invite you to apply. The application deadline is July 6 at 11:59 pm Anywhere on Earth; however, we will consider applications and select fellows on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply as early as possible. Current students are encouraged to check their academic calendars and apply with enough time to complete the fellowship, or as much of it as possible, before classes resume.We look forward to receiving your application!About the fellowshipYou will take the lead on a research project, with mentorship and support from other LPP researchers. We will support you in deciding what project and output will be most valuable for you to work towards, for example, publishing a report, journal/law review article, or blog post. We also expect fellows to attend regular meetings, give occasional presentations on their research, and provide feedback on other research pieces.Fellows will have the opportunity to select a research topic from a list prepared by LPP. Potential research topics for the summer may include:Tort law liability, including strict liability for abnormally dangerous activities, for activities related to the development and dissemination of transformative AI.Product liability law as a way to address harms from transformative AI.The role of litigation in mitigating risks from transformative AI.Potential obstacles for AI regulation presented by the major questions doctrine.First Amendment issues related to AI regulation.The design of a new international organization, similar to the IAEA or CERN, for the international governance of AI.The legal authorities of agencies in the United States government to address risks from transformative AI. The influence of different jurisdictions on the development and dissemination of transformative AI.Developing a syllabus for a course on law and transformative AI.This list of topics is non-exhaustive, and is presented to give an overview of the types of research we are interested in. Fellows will further define the research question at the beginning of the fellowship.In exceptional cases, we are open to research project proposals relevant to existential risk in one of our other focus areas.Selection criteriaWe are looking for graduate law students (JD or LLM), PhD candidates, and postdocs working in law. Students entering the final year of a 5-year undergraduate law degree are also welcome to apply. We strongly encourage you to apply if you have an interest in our work and are considering using your career to study or mitigate existential risks, particularly those from transformative AI. Candidates will be expected to apply their research capabilities and legal knowledge to AI governance, but are not required to have previous experience or expertise in AI.In addition to a willingness to [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QXywXmka8pACPuiHq/lpp-summer-research-fellowship-in-law-and-ai-2023
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A short and arguably unfinished blog post that I'm sharing as part of EA strategy fortnight. There's probably a lot more to say about this, but I've sat on this draft for a few months and don't expect to have time to develop the argument much further. -I understand longtermism to be the claim that positively shaping the long-term future is a moral priority. The argument for longtermism goes:The future could be extremely large;The beings who will inhabit that future matter, morally;There are things we can do to improve the lives of those beings (one of which is reducing existential risk);Therefore, positively shaping the long-term future should be a moral priority.However, I have one core worry about longtermism and it’s this: people (reasonably) see its adherents as power-seeking. I think this worry somewhat extends to broad existential risk reduction work, but much less so. cool planetArguments for longtermism tell us something important and surprising; that there is an extremely large thing that people aren’t paying attention to. That thing is the long-term future. In some ways, it’s odd that we have to draw attention to this extremely large thing. Everyone believes the future will exist and most people don’t expect the world to end that soon.[1]Perhaps what longtermism introduces to most people is actually premises 2 and 3 (above) — that we might have some reason to take it seriously, morally, and that we can shape it.In any case, longtermism seems to point to something that people vaguely know about or even agree with already and then say that we have reason to try and influence that thing.This would all be fine if everyone felt like they were on the same team. That, when longtermists say “we should try and influence the long-term future”, everyone listening sees themselves as part of that “we”.This doesn’t seem to be what’s happening. For whatever reason, when people hear longtermists say “we should try and influence the long-term future”, they hear the “we” as just the longtermists.[2]This is worrying to them. It sounds like this small group of people making this clever argument will take control of this extremely big thing that no one thought you could (or should) control.The only thing that could make this worse is if this small group of people were somehow undeserving of more power and influence, such as relatively wealthy[3], well-educated white men. Unfortunately, many people making this argument are relatively wealthy, well-educated white men (including me).To be clear, I think longtermists do not view accruing power as a core goal or as an implication of longtermism.[4] Importantly, when longtermists say “we should try and influence the long-term future”, I think they/we really mean everyone.[5]Ironically, it seems that, because no one else is paying attention to the extremely big thing, they’re going to have to be the first ones to pay attention to it.—I don’t have much in the way of a solution here. I mostly wanted to point to this worry and spell it out more clearly so that those [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KYApMdtPsveYPAoZk/longtermists-are-perceived-as-power-seeking
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Here’s a summary of ‘Why Intelligence Fails’ by the political scientist Robert Jervis. It’s a book about two cases where the U.S. intelligence community ‘failed’: being slow to foresee the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the overconfident and false assessment that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in 2003. I’m interested in summarising more books that contain valuable insights but are outside the typical EA canon. If you’d like more of this or have a book to suggest, let me know.[1]Key takeawaysGood intelligence generally requires the relevant agency to prioritise the topic and direct scarce resources to it. Good intelligence in a foreign country requires a dedicated diplomatic and covert collection corps with language skills and contextual knowledge.Intelligence analysis can be deficient in critical review, external expertise, and social-scientific methodology. Access to classified information only generates useful insight for some phenomena.Priors can be critical in determining interpretation within intelligence, and they can often go unchallenged. Political pressure can have a significant effect on analysis, but is hard to pin down.If the justification of an intelligence conclusion is unpublished, you can still interrogate it by asking:whether the topic would have been given sufficient priority and resources by the relevant intelligence organisationwhether classified information, if available, would be likely to yield insightwhether pre-existing beliefs are likely to bias analysiswhether political pressures could significantly affect analysisSome correctives to intelligence failures which may be useful to EA:demand sharp, explicit, and well-tracked predictionsdemand early warning indicators, and notice when beliefs can only be disproven at a late stageconsider negative indicators - 'dogs that don't bark', i.e. things that the view implies should not happenuse critical engagement by peers and external experts, especially by challenging fundamental beliefs that influence what seems plausible and provide alternative hypotheses and interpretationsuse red-teams, pre-mortems, and post-mortems.Why it’s relevant to EAThe most direct application of this topic is to the improvement of institutional decision-making, but there is value for any cause area depending on conducting or interpreting analysis of state and non-state adversaries, such as in biosecurity, nuclear war, or great power conflict. This topic may also contribute to the reader's sense of when and how much one should defer to the outputs of intelligence communities. Deference is motivated by their access to classified information and presumed analytic capability. However, Tetlock’s ‘Expert Political Judgment’ cast doubt on the value of classified information for improving prediction compared to generalist members of the public.Finally, assessments of the IC’s epistemic practices might offer lessons for how an intellectual community should grapple with information hazards, both intellectually and socially. More broadly, the IC is an example of a group pursuing complex, decision-relevant analysis in a high-uncertainty environment. Their successes and failures may be instructive to similar EA efforts.I think I capture around 80% of the key content in this summary, but if you wanted to read it yourself it’s a short book and much of it is interesting.[2] Reading chapters 1 and 4 would give the best sense of the implications and Jervis’ overall view. Chapter 3 on [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EJAFvvnbZHA7zn2LA/book-summary-why-intelligence-fails-by-robert-jervis
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Tl;dr: This post, which is part of the EA Strategy Fortnight series, summarizes some of my current views about the importance of AI welfare, research priorities for AI welfare research, and principles for AI welfare research.1. IntroductionAs humans start to take seriously the prospect of AI consciousness, sentience, and sapience, we also need to take seriously the prospect of AI welfare. That is, we need to take seriously the prospect that AI systems can have positive or negative states like pleasure, pain, happiness, and suffering, and that if they do, then these states can be good or bad for them.A world that includes the prospect of AI welfare is a world that requires the development of AI welfare research. Researchers need to examine whether and to what extent AI systems might have the capacity for welfare. And to the extent that they might, researchers need to examine what might be good or bad for AI systems and what follows for our actions and policies.The bad news is that AI welfare research will be difficult. Many researchers are likely to be skeptical of this topic at first. And even insofar as we take the topic seriously, it will be difficult for us to know what, if anything, it might be like to be an AI system. After all, the only mind that we can directly access is our own, and so our ability to study other minds is limited at best.The good news is that we have a head start. Researchers have spent the past half century making steady progress in animal welfare research. And while there are many potentially relevant differences between animals and AI systems, there are also many potentially relevant similarities – enough for it to be useful for us to look to animal welfare research for guidance.In Fall 2022, we launched the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, which examines the nature and intrinsic value of nonhuman minds, with special focus on invertebrates and AI systems. In this post, I summarize some of my current views about the importance of AI welfare, priorities for AI welfare research, and principles for AI welfare research.I want to emphasize that this post discusses these issues in a selective and general way. A comprehensive treatment of these issues would need to address many more topics in much more detail. But I hope that this discussion can be a useful starting point for researchers who want to think more deeply about what might be good or bad for AI systems in the future.I also want to emphasize that this post expresses my current, tentative views about this topic. It might not reflect the views of other people at the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program or of other experts in effective altruism, global priorities research, and other relevant research, advocacy, or policy communities. It might not even reflect my own views a year from now.Finally, I want to emphasize that AI welfare is only one of many topics that merit more attention right now. Many other topics merit [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SZJBE3fuk2majqwJQ/principles-for-ai-welfare-research
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This post is a personal reflection that follows my journey to effective altruism, my experiences within it, the concerns I've developed along the way and my hopes for addressing them. It culminates in my views on funding constraints — the role we can all play in solving them and a key question I have for you all: What stops us?My journeyWhile this starts with a reflection on my personal journey, I suspect it might feel familiar, it might strike a chord, at times it might rhyme with yours.I was about eight years old when I was first confronted with the tragic reality that an overwhelming number of children my age were suffering and dying from preventable diseases and unjust economic conditions.It broke my heart. I knew that I had done nothing to deserve my incredibly privileged position of being born healthy to a loving, stable, middle-income family in Australia (a country with one of the highest standards of living).Throughout my early years, I took many opportunities to do what I could to right this wrong. In school, that meant participating in fundraisers and advocacy. As a young professional, that meant living frugally but still giving a relatively meagre amount to help others. When I got my first stable job, I decided it was time to give 10% to help others... But when I calculated that that would be $5,000, this commitment began to feel like a pretty big deal. I wasn't going to back down, but I wanted to be more confident that it'd actually result in something good. I felt a responsibility to donate wisely.Some Googling quickly led me to discover Giving What We Can, GiveWell, and Julia Wise's blog Giving Gladly. From this first introduction to what would soon be known as the effective altruism (EA) community, I found the information I needed to help guide me, and the inspiration I needed to help me follow through.I also took several opportunities to pursue a more impact-oriented career, and even tried getting involved in politics. These attempts had varying success, but that was okay: I had one constant opportunity to help others by giving.Around this time, the EA community started expanding their lines of reasoning beyond effective giving advice to other areas like careers and advocacy. I was thrilled to see this. We all have an opportunity to use various resources to make a dent in the world's problems, and the same community that had made good progress on philanthropy seemed to me well-positioned to make progress on other fronts too.By 2016, effective altruism was well and truly “a thing” and I discovered that there was an EA group and conference near me. So, I ventured out to actually meet some of these "effective altruism" people in person.It hit me: I'd finally found "my people."These were people who actually cared enough to put their money where their mouths were, to use the best tools they could find to make the biggest possible difference, and to advocate for others to join them. None of these things were easy, but these [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WMdEJjLAHmdwyA5Wm/we-can-all-help-solve-funding-constraints-what-stops-us
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Exec summaryUnder SoGive’s methodology, charities holding more than 1.5 years’ expenditure are typically rated “too rich”, in the absence of a strong reason to judge otherwise. (more)Our level of confidence in the appropriateness of this policy depends on fundamental ethical considerations, and could be “clearly (c.95%) very well justified” or “c.50% to c.90% confident in this policy, depending on the charity” (more) We understand that the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) holds > 4 years of spend (c$85m), as at the most recently published Form 990, well in excess of our warning threshold. (more)We are now around 90% confident that NTI’s reserves are well in excess of our warning threshold, indeed >3x annual spend, although there are some caveats. (more) Our conversation with NTI about this provides little reason to believe that we should deviate from our default rating of “too rich”. (more)It is possible that NTI could show us forecasts of their future income and spend that might make us less likely to be concerned about the value of donations to NTI, although this seems unlikely since they have already indicated that they do not wish to share this. (more)We do not typically recommend that donors donate to NTI. However we do think it’s valuable for donors to communicate that they are interested in supporting their work, but are avoiding donating to NTI because of their high reserves. (more)Although this post is primarily to help donors decide whether to donate to NTI, readers may find it interesting for understanding SoGive's approach to charities which are too rich, and how this interacts with different ethical systems.We thank NTI for agreeing to discuss this with us knowing that there was a good chance that we might publish something on the back of the discussion. We showed them a draft of this post before publishing; they indicated that they disagree with the premise of the piece, but declined to indicate what specifically they disagreed with.0. Intent of this postAlthough this post highlights the fact that NTI has received funding from Open Philanthropy (Open Phil), the aim is not to put Open Philanthropy on the spot or demand any response from them.Rather, we have argued that it is often a good idea for donors to “coattail” (i.e. copy) donations made by Open Phil. For donors doing this, including donors supported by SoGive, we think it’s useful to know which Open Phil grantees we might give lower or higher priority to.1. Background on SoGive’s methodology for assessing reservesThe SoGive ratings scale has a category called “too rich”. It is used for charities which we deem to have a large enough amount of money that it no longer makes sense for donors to provide them with funds. We set this threshold at 18 months of spend (i.e. if the amount of unrestricted reserves is one and a half times as big as its annual spend then we typically deem the charity “too rich”). To be clear, this allows the charity carte blanche to hold as much money as it likes as [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DpQFod5P9e5yJxeCP/sogive-rates-open-phil-funded-charity-nti-too-rich
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My lab has started devoting some resources to AI safety work. As a transparency measure and to reach out, I here describe our approach. Overall Approach I select small theoretical and practical work packages that...
seem manageable in view of our very limited resources, match our mixed background in applied machine learning, game theory, agent-based modeling, complex networks science, dynamical systems theory, social choice theory, mechanism design, environmental economics, behvioural social science, pure mathematics, and applied statistics, and appear under-explored or neglected but promising or even necessary, according to our subjective assessment based on our reading of the literature and exchanges with individuals from applied machine learning, computer linguistics, AI ethics researchers, and most importantly, AI alignment researchers (you?).
Initial Reasoning I believe that the following are likely to hold:
We don't want the world to develop into a very low-welfare state. Powerful AI agents that optimizes for an objective not almost perfectly aligned with welfare can produce very low-welfare states Powerful AI agents will emerge soon enough. It is impossible to specify sufficiently well what "welfare" means (welfare theorists have tried for centuries and still disagree, common people disagree even more).
My puzzling conclusion from this is:
We can't make sure that powerful AI agents optimize for an objective that is almost perfectly aligned with welfare. We must try to prevent that any powerful AI agent optimizes for any objective whatsoever.
Those of you who are Asimov fans like me might like the following... Six Laws of Non-Optimizing
Never attempt to optimize* your behavior with regards to any metric. Constrained by 1, don't cause suffering or do other harm. Constrained by 1-2, prevent other agents from violating 1. or 2. Constrained by 1-3, do what the stakeholders in your behavior would collectively decide you should do. Constrained by 1-4, cooperate with other agents. Constrained by 1-5, protect and improve yourself.
Rather than trying to formalize this or even define the terms precisely, I just use them to roughly guide my work. *When saying "optimize" I mean it in the strict mathematical sense: aiming to find an exact or approximate, local or global maximum or minimum of some function. When I mean mere improvements w.r.t. some metric, I just say "improve" rather than "optimize". Agenda We currently slowly pursue two parallel approaches, the first related to laws 1,3,5 from above, the other related to law 4. Non-Optimizing Agents
Explore several novel variants of "satisficing" policies and related learning algorithms for POMDPs, produce corresponding non-optimizing versions of classical to state-of-the art tabular and ANN-based RL algorithms, and test and evaluate them in benchmark and safety-relevant environments from the literature, plus in tailormade environments for testing particular hypotheses. (Currently underway) Test them in near-term relevant application areas such as autonomous vehicles, via state-of-the-art complex simulation environments. (Planned with partner from autonomous vehicles research) Using our game-theoretical and agent-based modeling expertise, study them in multi-agent environments both theoretically and numerically. Design evolutionarily stable non-optimizing strategies for non-optimizing agents that cooperate with others to [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZWjDkENuFohPShTyc/my-lab-s-small-ai-safety-agenda
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The EA community has expanded to encompass a broad spectrum of interests, making its identity and definition a hotly debated topic. In my view, the community's current diversity could easily support multiple distinct communities, and if we were building a movement from scratch, it would likely look different from the current EA movement. Defining sub-communities within the EA movement can be approached in numerous ways. One proposed division that I believe captures much of what people appreciate about the EA community, is as follows:Question-based communitiesAn Effective Giving CommunityAn Impactful Career CommunityAnswer-based communitiesAn AI X-Risk CommunityAn Effective Animal Advocacy Community Question-based communitiesAn Effective Giving CommunityThe concept of effective giving is where EA originated and remains a significant component of the community. Notable organizations such as GWWC, Effektiv Spenden, One for the World, Founders Pledge, and others, share a common mission and practical outcomes. The primary metric for this community is directing funds towards highly impactful areas. GiveWell, for instance, is perhaps the first and most recognized organization within this effective giving community outside the EA movement. This community benefits from its diversity and plurality, as many people could, for example, take the 10% pledge, and an even larger number could enhance their giving effectiveness using EA principles. Key concepts for this community could include determining the best charities to donate to, identifying the most effective charity evaluators, and deciding how much one should donate. This, in many ways, echoes the fundamentals of the EA 1.0 community. An Impactful Career Community In addition to funding, individuals can contribute to the world through their careers. Much like the effective giving community, there's the question of how to maximize the impact of one's career across multiple cause areas. Organizations such as Probably Good, High Impact Professionals, or Charity Entrepreneurship focus on this area (I intentionally exclude career-focused organizations with a narrow cause area focus, like 80,000 Hours or Animal Advocacy Careers). The objective of this community would be related to career changes and enhancing understanding of the most impactful career paths. Although this is a broadly inclusive community benefiting from cause plurality, it's likely less extensive than the effective giving community, as a smaller percentage of the population will prioritize impact when considering a career switch. Relevant topics for this community could include identifying high absorbency, impactful careers, assessing the most impactful paths for individuals with specific value or skill sets, and determining underrated careers. Answer-based communities, e.g., AI X-Risk Community The second community category that is a bit different from these others is anwer-based communities. I think there are two somewhat distinctive answer-based communities in EA: AI and animals. I think AI X-risk is a better example as it's more often mixed with the other above two communities and has significantly grown as a unique area within EA. This community consists of meta-organizations like Longview, Effective Giving and 80,000 Hours as well as the organizations working directly on the problem. It has begun to hold separate forums, conferences, and events. Its shared goal is to mitigate existential risks from AI, a specific objective that doesn't necessarily require members to embrace effective giving [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/czsP5iWmz3wLtz7LT/question-and-answer-based-ea-communities
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Ian Hogarth has just been announced as the Chair of the UK's AI Foundation Model Taskforce. He's the author of the FT article "We must slow down the race to God-like AGI", and seems to take X-risks from AI seriously.To quote his twitter thread:And to that end I put out a call to people across the world. If you are an AI specialist or safety researcher who wants to build out state capacity in AI safety and help shape the future of AI policy then get in touch:We have £100m to spend on AI safety and the first global conference to prepare for. I want to hear from you and how you think you can help. The time is now and we need more people to step up and help.The google form to leave an expression of interest is here.(I am in no way affiliated with Ian or the UK Foundation Model Task Force) Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qTAE9GZ9kAKnstvJ4/uk-foundation-model-task-force-expression-of-interest
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A summary of current work in AI governanceIf you’d like to learn more about AI governance, apply to the AI Safety Fundamentals: Governance Track, a 12-week, part-time fellowship before June 25.ContextFor the past nine months, I spent ~50% of my time upskilling in AI alignment and governance alongside my role as a research assistant in compute governance. While I discovered great writing characterizing AI governance on a high level, few texts covered which work is currently ongoing. To improve my understanding of the current landscape, I began compiling different lines of work and made a presentation. People liked my presentation and suggested I could publish this as a blog post.Disclaimers:I’ve only started working in the field ~9 months agoI haven’t run this by any of the organizations I am mentioning. My impression of their work is likely different from their intent behind it.I’m biased toward the work by GovAI as I engage with that most.My list is far from comprehensive.What is AI governance?Note that I am primarily discussing AI governance in the context of preventing existential risks.Matthijs Maas defines AI long-term governance as“The study and shaping of local and global governance systems—including norms, policies, laws, processes, politics, and institutions—that affect the research, development, deployment, and use of existing and future AI systems in ways that positively shape societal outcomes into the long-term future.”Considering this, I want to point out:AI governance is not just government policy, but involves a large range of actors. (In fact, the most important decisions in AI governance are currently being made at major AI labs rather than at governments.)The field is broad. Rather than only preventing misalignment, AI governance is concerned with a variety of ways in which future AI systems could impact the long-term prospects of humanity.Since "long-term" somewhat implies that those decisions are far away, another term used to describe the field is “governance of advanced AI systems.”Threat ModelsResearchers and policymakers in AI governance are concerned with a range of threat models from the development of advanced AI systems. For an overview, I highly recommend Allan Dafoe’s research agenda and Sam Clarke’s "Classifying sources of AI x-risk".To illustrate this point, I will briefly describe some of the main threat models discussed in AI governance. Feel free to skip right to the main part.Takeover by an uncontrollable, agentic AI systemThis is the most prominent threat model and the focus of most AI safety research. It focuses on the possibility that future AI systems may exceed humans in critical capabilities such as deception and strategic planning. If such models develop adversarial goals, they could attempt and succeed at permanently disempowering humanity.Prominent examples of where this threat model has been articulated:Is power-seeking AI an existential risk?, Joe Carlsmith, 2022AGI Ruin: A list of lethalities, Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2022 (In a very strong form, see also this in-depth response from Paul Christiano)The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective, Ngo et al., 2022Loss of control through automationEven if AI systems remain predominantly non-agentic, the increasing automation of societal and economic decision-making, driven by market incentives [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8KhGio2rhgHgsBoZ6/a-summary-of-current-work-in-ai-governance
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This is a frame that I have found useful and I'm sharing in case others find it useful. EA has arguably gone through several waves:Waves of EA (highly simplified model — see caveats below) First waveSecond waveThird waveTime period2010[1]-2017[2]2017-20232023-??Primary constraintMoneyTalent???Primary call to actionDonations to effective charitiesCareer changePrimary target audienceMiddle-upper-class peopleUniversity students and early career professionalsFlagship cause areaGlobal health and developmentLongtermismMajor hubsOxford > SF Bay > Berlin (?)SF Bay > Oxford > London > DC > BostonThe boundaries between waves are obviously vague and somewhat arbitrary. This table is also overly simplistic – I first got involved in EA through animal welfare, which is not listed at all on this table, for example. But I think this is a decent first approximation.It’s not entirely clear to me whether we are actually in a third wave. People often overestimate the extent to which their local circumstances are unique. But there are two main things which make me think that we have a “wave” which is distinct from, say, mid 2022:ubstantially less money, through a combination of Meta stock falling, FTX collapsing, and general market/crypto downturns[3]AI safety becoming (relatively) mainstreamIf I had to choose an arbitrary date for the beginning of the third wave, I might choose March 22, 2023, when the FLI open letter on pausing AI experiments was published.It remains to be seen if public concern about AI is sustained – Superintelligence was endorsed by a bunch of fancy people when it first came out, but they mostly faded away. If it is sustained though, I think EA will be in a qualitatively new regime: one where AI safety worries are common, AI safety is getting a lot of coverage, people with expertise in AI safety might get into important rooms, and where the field might be less neglected.Third wave EA: what are some possibilities?Here are a few random ideas; I am not intending to imply that these are the most likely scenarios.Example future scenarioPolitics and Civil Society[4]Forefront of weirdnessReturn to non-AI causesDescription of the possible “third wave” — chosen to illustrate the breadth of possibilitiesThere is substantial public appetite to heavily regulate AI. The technical challenges end up being relatively easy. The archetypal EA project is running a grassroots petition for a moratorium on AI.AI safety becomes mainstream and "spins out" of EA. EA stays at the forefront of weirdness and the people who were previously interested in AI safety turn their focus to digital sentience, acausal moral trade, and other issues that still fall outside the Overton window.AI safety becomes mainstream and "spins out" of EA. AI safety advocates leave EA, and vibes shift back to “first wave” EA.Primary constraintPolitical willResearchMoneyPrimary call to actionVoting/advocacyResearchDonationsPrimary target audienceVoters in US/EUFuture researchers (university students)Middle-upper class peopleFlagship cause areaAI regulationDigital sentienceAnimal welfareWhere do we go from here?I’m interested in organizing more projects like EA Strategy Fortnight. I don’t feel very confident about what third wave EA should look like, or even that there will be a third wave, but it does seem worth spending time discussing the possibilities.I'm particularly interested [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XTBGAWAXR25atu39P/third-wave-effective-altruism
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I am linkposting this open access article by Michael Plant about the meat eater problem. Some excerpt and quick thoughts are below.AbstractHere are two commonly held moral views. First, we must save strangers’ lives, at least if we can do so easily: you would be required to rescue a child drowning in a pond even if it will ruin your expensive suit. Second, it is wrong to eat meat because of the suffering caused to animals in factory farms. Many accept both simultaneously—Peter Singer is the pre-eminent example. I point out that these two beliefs are in a sharp and seemingly unrecognised tension and may even be incompatible. It seems universally accepted that doing or allowing a harm is permissible—and may even be required—when it is the lesser evil. I argue that, if meat eating is wrong on animal suffering grounds then, once we consider how much suffering might occur, it starts to seem plausible that saving strangers would be the greater evil than not rescuing them and is, therefore, not required after all. Given the uncertainties and subjective assessments here, reasonable people could substantially disagree. The surprising result is that a moral principle widely considered to be obviously true—we must rescue others—is not, on further reflection, obviously true and would be defensibly rejected by some. Some potential implications are discussed.1. IntroductionIt is widely believed that we, as members of the public, have a Duty of Easy Rescue to one another.Duty of Easy Rescue: We are required to save lives in rescue cases, one-off instances where we can physically save a stranger [not a friend or really good person] at trivial cost to ourselves.1To illustrate this, consider the following, familiar case from Singer2:Shallow Pond: You are walking past a shallow pond and see a drowning child. You can easily rescue the child, but doing so will ruin the expensive new suit you are wearing.Intuitively, we are required to save the child. This is because, as Peter Singer explains: “[it] will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”3It is also widely believed that it is wrong to be a meat eater, someone who regularly consumes animal products produced from factory farms.4 This is on the grounds that this consumption requires creating animals who, due to the conditions in factory farms, live overall bad lives.5[...]This paper argues these two beliefs are, in reality, in substantial tension and may well be incompatible, once additional plausible empirical and normative considerations are accounted for. Further, if they are incompatible, we must abandon the notion that there is a Duty of Easy Rescue.Here, in brief, is the argument. We accept that doing (or allowing) harm is permissible—and may be required—when it is the lesser evil; to put the same thing differently, we are not required to do (or allow) the greater evil. Therefore, we wouldn’t be required to save lives, even if we could do so easily, if that would be [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T3P4oX6F8tMh4h55s/the-meat-eater-problem
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Eric Drexler's report Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS)as General Intelligence reshaped how a lot of people think about AI (summary 1, summary 2). I still agree with many parts of it, perhaps even the core elements of the model. However, after looking back on it more than four years later, I think the general picture it gave missed some crucial details about how AI will go.The problem seems to be that his model neglected a discussion of foundation models, which I think have transformed how we should think about AI services and specialization. The general vibe I got from CAIS (which may not have been Drexler's intention) was something like the following picture: For each task in the economy, we will train a model from scratch to automate the task, using the minimum compute necessary to train an AI to do well on the task. Over time, the fraction of tasks automated will slowly expand like a wave, starting with the tasks that are cheapest to automate computationally, and ending with the most expensive tasks. At some point, automation will be so widespread that it will begin to meaningfully feed into itself, increasing AI R&D, and accelerating the rate of technological progress.The problem with this approach to automation is that it's extremely wasteful to train models from scratch for each task. It might make sense when training budgets are tiny — as they mostly were in 2018 — but it doesn't make sense when it takes 10^25 FLOP to reach adequate performance on a given set of tasks.The big obvious-in-hindsight idea that we've gotten over the last several years is that, instead of training from scratch for each new task, we'll train train a foundation model on some general distribution, which can then be fine-tuned using small amounts of compute to perform well on any task. In the CAIS model, "general intelligence" is just the name we can give to the collection of all AI services in the economy. In this new paradigm "general intelligence" refers to the fact that sufficiently large foundation models can efficiently transfer their knowledge to obtain high performance on almost any downstream task, which is pretty closely analogous to what humans do to take over jobs.The fact that generalist models can be efficiently adapted to perform well on almost any task is an incredibly important fact about our world, because it implies that a very large fraction of the costs of automation can be parallelized across almost all tasks. Let me illustrate this fact with a hypothetical example.Suppose we previously thought that it would take $1 trillion to automate each task in our economy, such as language translation, box stacking, and driving cars. Since the cost of automating each of these tasks is $1 trillion each, you might expect companies would slowly automate all the tasks in the economy, starting with the most profitable ones, and then finally getting around to the least profitable ones once economic growth allowed for us to spend enough money on automating [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JerCe5yRv3Gjwvqrn/updating-drexler-s-cais-model
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This post is an update on the task force on reforms EA organizations might make.Currently the people on the task force are me (employee at Centre for Effective Altruism, board member at GiveWell), Ozzie Gooen (president at Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute, board member at Rethink Charity, former board member at Rethink Priorities), and Sam Donald (strategy fellow at Open Philanthropy, former staff at COVID taskforce at UK Cabinet Office, former staff at McKinsey). We also have a discussion space with a larger group of about a dozen people (experts in related fields, EA organization staff, and community members). Currently the total time on this project is about 1 full-time equivalent, mostly from Julia.We realize a small group of people isn’t going to reflect all the views or types of expertise useful for a project like this. Our goal is to draw on that expertise, often from people who don’t have time to participate in frequent meetings about EA reforms, and to synthesize views and practical information from a range of sources. If you have suggestions for people it would be useful for us to get input from (including yourself!) we're happy to hear ideas at this form.So far the process has included:Reading and cataloging the problems identified and possible solutions proposed in posts about institutional reform that have been written up on the Forum.Speaking to ~25 people about which areas they see as most important for possible reforms in EA, and what best practices they think EA should be adapting from other fields. We’re trying to speak with a mix of people with significant experience in EA institutions, and people with significant work history in non-EA institutions (nonprofits, finance, government, management consulting.)Researching existing whistleblowing platforms and lawsNext steps:Better defining possible reforms based on the ideas collected and discussed. Getting more advice from people with professional experience in those areas.Understanding the pros and cons of a possible changeUnderstanding what’s legally feasible (e.g. given how different countries regulate nonprofit boards)As we get closer to specific recommendations, discussing them with relevant staff at organizations, to learn more about barriers and feasibility of the possible changes.Spelling out concrete recommendations to organizations. We expect this might be in the form of 5- to 15-page reports, with different reports for different organizations.A further public update about the project, though this likely won’t include all the specifics of the recommendations made to organizations.Shapes that our recommendations might take:“Here’s a change we think organization X should make.” (Likely to focus on Open Philanthropy and Effective Ventures.)“Here’s a change we think any organization in situation Y should make — we think there are a dozen organizations in that situation.” (Likely to focus on basic governance practices for small organizations, like having a staff handbook if there isn’t one.)“Here’s a function/service that doesn’t currently exist in EA; we think it’s probably good for it to be created and funded.”After we have proposals clearly spelled out, we’ll present them to the various organizations. These will be recommendations, not requirements. We hope that doing this as a general effort across EA can [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/73mAv8m3PjsXzJ4Ad/update-on-task-force-on-reforms-at-ea-organizations
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Purpose of postAs part of the EA Strategy Fortnight, we want to compile some survey results addressing how FTX has impacted the EA brand—particularly people’s sentiments towards EA. From the research we have on attitudes toward EA from the EA community, the general public, and university students, it seems that the FTX crash hasn’t, overall, impacted sentiments toward EA very much.This is not to say that FTX has not significantly impacted people in many ways, including mental and emotional health, levels of trust in EA leadership, and increased uncertainty in EA as a movement. We hope compiling these survey results will help contextualize our individual experiences and improve our understanding of general attitudes toward EA.The EA CommunityIn December 2022, Rethink Priorities ran a survey to gauge how the FTX crisis affected EA community members’ attitudes toward the EA movement, organizations, and leadership (fuller results of that survey from Rethink are here).[1]Data points:Results demonstrated that FTX had decreased satisfaction by 0.5-1 points on a 10-point scale within the EA community, but overall community sentiment remained positive at ~7.5/10.Around half of the respondents reported that the FTX crisis gave them concerns with EA meta-organizations, the EA community and its norms, and the leaders of EA meta-organizations.More respondents agreed that the EA community had responded well to the crisis so far (47%) than disagreed (21%), though roughly a third of respondents neither agreed nor disagreed with this.Most respondents reported continuing to trust EA organizations, though over 30% said they had substantially lost trust in EA public figures or leadership.University StudentsThe CEA groups team surveyed some university group organizers regarding the states of their individual groups in May 2023. From November 2022 to February 2023, Rethink commissioned a survey to measure campus awareness of EA and whether students’ awareness of EA was because of FTX.[2]Data points:When CEA polled university group organizers, they gave an average response of 3.8/10 to “How worried are you about how your group is perceived on campus?” Only two organizers mentioned FTX, and both of them only did so to state that they haven’t seen impacts from FTX—though one said that this might change in the fall.The vast majority of students interviewed on campuses did not mention FTX when asked where and when they heard about EA, and only 13/233 (5.6%) respondents who had encountered EA found FTX or SBF salient enough to mention when interviewed.Most respondents to Rethink's survey hadn't encountered EA. Of those who had (233), only 18 (1.1% of total respondents) referred to FTX/SBF explicitly or obliquely when asked what they think effective altruism means or where and when they first heard of it.General PublicRethink ran surveys pre- and post-FTX assessing awareness of and feelings towards EA in the US general public and later in more elite (educated and informed) US groups in February-March (post-FTX).Data points:Awareness of EA remains low, and ~99% of people who were aware of EA did not mention FTX.Among those aware of EA, attitudes remain positive and actually maybe increased post-FTX —though they were lower [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SFAMvCxnEzaQHNeSL/how-has-ftx-s-collapse-affected-public-perception-of-ea
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Hi, EAs! I'm Ed Mathieu, manager of a team of data scientists and researchers at Our World in Data (OWID), a scientific online publication founded by Max Roser and based out of the University of Oxford.We aim to make the data and research on the world's largest problems accessible and understandable. You can learn more about our mission on our site.You’re welcome to ask me anything! I’ll start answering questions on Friday, 23 June.Feel free to ask anything you may want to know about our mission, work, articles, charts, or more meta-aspects like our team structure, the history of OWID, etc.Please post your questions as comments on this post. The earlier you share your questions, the higher the chances they'll make it to the top!Please upvote questions you'd most like answered.I'll answer questions on Friday, 23 June. Questions posted after that are less likely to get answers. (This is an “AMA” — you can explore others here.)I joined OWID in 2020 and spent the first couple of years leading our work on the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, my role has expanded to the coordination of all the research & data work on our site.I previously worked as a data scientist at the University of Oxford in the departments of Population Health and Primary Care Health Sciences; and as a data science consultant in the private sector.For a (3.5-hour) overview of my background, the work of our team at OWID, and the principles we follow to make research and data more understandable and accessible, you can listen to my interview with Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti on Hear This Idea. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eoGrGYMhGYmTkkPSg/ama-ed-mathieu-head-of-data-and-research-at-our-world-in
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Rational Animations is hiring. If you would like to apply reach out to rationalanimations@gmail.com. The more material you include, the easier for me to evaluate you. The hiring process will probably consist of a short interview and a period you should consider a trial, even if paid at full salary.AI Safety scriptwriterAt the moment, Rational Animations has two consistently active writers, and the only one doing AI Safety scripts at the moment is me. I'd like to have more slack and be able to publish a lot of high-quality AI Safety explainers in the coming months and years. Our animation team is growing, and we will be able to publish videos much faster. Pay: 50 -150 USD per hour. If I offer you 150 per hour, I'll limit your hours to 10 per week, at least for the next few months. That said, I'm looking for someone who can put in consistent effort. At any given time, most scriptwriters in Rational are inactive, and I'm 100% OK with that, but I'm also looking for someone I can consistently rely on.What may help you land the job:Having written good stuff about AI Safety helps enormously.Mathematical education helps.AI education helps.AI Safety education (e.g., having studied the AGISF curriculum) helps.Surely other things I have yet to think of.I may hire more than one person if many good candidates apply. I may also decide to hire no one.Bonus: I expect people in this role to be able to write scripts for shorts about AI Safety (more below).Lead community managerShortly, we will include many more calls to action in our videos to increase our impact. But that is only one way to go about it. Another option I'm excited about is building our own spaces for the most hardcore followers of the channel to go much deeper into our topics. These spaces include, but may not be limited to:Discord (high priority)Reddit (high priority)TwitterInstagramYour job consists of developing strategies to help with this objective and taking action to pursue them. The outcome you should try to achieve is to help people land in those spaces and curate them so that the users learn a lot.Our highest-priority topic is becoming AI Safety, so the most important thing you'll do is to help people skill up in that subject. Here's an example of how I picture the funnel:1. We make videos about AI Safety.2. People land on our Discord server.3. You help the most interested people skill up by talking with them and linking resources.4. You help them stay accountable if they decide to embark on a learning journey by, e.g., organizing book clubs, weekly meetings in the style of AGISF, etc.You will also manage a small team comprising two artists and a moderator. They will help you achieve your objectives for our social media and online spaces.Pay: 25-50 USD per hour. More for exceptional candidates. At 50 per hour, I may have to limit your hours for a while, but not more than five months, and possibly not at [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cCJhuRuyTuGcAGcXu/rational-animations-is-looking-for-an-ai-safety-scriptwriter
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"Starting a company is like chewing glass. Eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood."Building a new organization is extremely hard. It's hard when you've done it before, even several times. It's even harder the first time.Some new organizations are very similar to existing organizations. The founders of the new org can go look at all the previous closeby examples, learn from them, copy their playbook and avoid their mistakes. If your org is shaped like a Y-combinator company, you can spend dozens of hours absorbing high-quality, expert-crafted content which has been tested and tweaked and improved over hundreds of companies and more than a decade. You can do a 15 minute interview to go work next to a bunch of the best people who are also building your type of org, and learn by looking over their shoulder and troubleshooting together. You get to talk to a bunch of people who have actually succeeded building an org-like-yours. How likely is org building success, in this premier reference class, rich with prior examples to learn from, with a tried and true playbook, a tight community of founder peers, the advice of many people who have tried to do your kind of thing and won? 5%. https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/y-combinator-accelerator-success-rate-unicornsAn AI safety lab is not the same as a Y-combinator company. It is. WAY. FUCKING. HARDER.Y-combinator crowd has a special category for orgs which are trying build something that requires > ~any minor research breakthrough: HARD tech. Yet the vast majority of these Hard Tech companies are actually building on top of an academic field which basically has the science figured out. Ginkgo Bioworks did not need to figure out the principles of molecular biology, nor the tools and protocols of genetic engineering. They took the a decades old, well-developed paradigm, and worked within it to incrementally build something new. How does this look for AI safety?And how about timing. Y-combinator reference class companies take a long time to build. Growing headcount slowly, running lean: absolutely essential if you are stretching out your last funding round over 7 years to iterate your way from a 24 hour livestream tv show of one guy's life to a game streaming company. Remind me again, what are your timelines?I could keep going on this for a while. People? Fewer. Funding? Monolithic. Advice from the winners? HA.Apply these updates to our starting reference class success rate ofONE. IN. TWENTY.Now count the AI safety labs. Multiply by ~3. That is the roughly the number of people who are not the subject of this post. For all the rest of us, consider several criticisms and suggestions, which were not feasible to run by the subjects of this post before publication0. Nobody knows what they are fucking doing when founding and running an AI safety lab and everyone who says they do is lying to you.1. Nobody has ever seen an organization which has succeeded at this goal.2. Nobody has ever met the founder of such an organization, nor noted down their qualifications.3. If the [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PJLx7CwB4mtaDgmFc/critiques-of-non-existent-ai-safety-labs-yours
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At the Digital Platforms policy brief press conference on Monday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres started his speech with:Distinguish members of our press corps. New technology is moving at warp speed, and so are the threats that come with it. Alarm bells over the latest form of Artificial Intelligence - generative AI - are deafening. And they are loudest from the developers who designed it. These scientists and experts have called on the World to act, declaring AI an existential threat to humanity on a par with the risk of nuclear war[1]. We must take those warnings seriously. Our proposal, Global Digital Compact New Agenda for Peace and Accord on the Global Governance of AI, will offer multilateral solutions based on human rights[2].(Video here.)Guterres went on to discuss current damage from digital technology ("but the Advent of generative AI must not distract us from the damaged digital technology is already doing to our world").The opening mention of existential threat from AI is a very welcome development in terms of the possibility of global coordination on the issue.^It seems likely that the CAIS Statement on AI Risk - Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. - was instrumental in prompting this, given the mention of nuclear war^In terms of extinction risk, remember the right to life is first and foremost! Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wxxoRHmisojF6Y2qD/un-secretary-general-recognises-existential-threat-from-ai
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Mainly discussed in the linked article - keeping the post brief. The newest EU AI Act parliament version passed an important vote, despite recent political uncertainty. I found it fascinating to watch the the Plenary session (from June 13th, the vote was on the 14th), where the Act was discussed by various EU parties. A few things that stood out to me:I was surprised that many EU country representatives mentioned the Open Letters and Existential Risk as a real concern, even though the EU AI Act was not originally intended to address it (though, it now has GPAI/foundation model bits added). Transparency and Fairness took a back seat, to some extent. Real-time Biometric monitoring was a big debate topic - whether to giving an exemption for law enforcement or not, for national security. Currently it looks like it will not be allowed, other than post-incident with special approval. This may be a useful lever to keep in mind for policy workOthers that watched the stream, feel free to mention insights in the comments. Linked here (relevant timestamp 12:39 - 14:33) Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ctPrrzFnXGyWrmK3w/eu-ai-act-passed-vote-in-plenary-meeting
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TLDR: I've assembled a mindmap of all EA (-related) entities I could find. You can access it at tinyurl.com/eamindmap. If I missed or misrepresented anything: leave a note and I'll add it or correct it. I've also added other existing lists of orgs to this post. ContextStarting my position at EA Netherlands as a co-director, I was advised by EA Pathfinder (now Successif) to make an overview of the EA space. In this way it would be easier to onboard, support community members and follow conversations. I made this mindmap of EA(-related) entities and this quickly got out of hand. I asked around, whether such overviews already exists. There were a view: Overview of EA organizations[1]EA Org list (EA Opportunity Board) - From this list, I use this overview most often as it seems to be very comprehensive and includes meta data such as 'involvement with EA'. EA Org wiki (Jamie Gittins) - Introduced via a Forum post. I'd share this link if someone is new, or looking for an EA aligned career, as it has clear descriptions for every orgEA/Rationalist-Related Orgs (Arden P. B. W.) - Also contains fellowships, courses and YouTube channelsDatabase of orgs relevant to longtermist/x-risk work (Michael Aird) - Very comprehensive listOverview of effective giving organisations ->Overview of the public effective giving ecosystem (supply and demand) [shared] (Sjir Hoeijmakers) - Amazing to see all these giving orgs, I had no idea Let's advertise EA infrastructure projects, Feb 2023 - A list of EA-related projects and orgs that offer free and useful servicesEASE: directory of independent agencies and freelancers offering expertise to EA-aligned organizations AISafety.world is a map of the AIS ecosystemOther somewhat related lists:OpenBook: New EA Grants DatabaseList of EA Slack workspaces (Alex Berezhnoi)List of EA-aligned research training programs (Michael Aird)Effective Altruism DataHistorical EA funding data Let me know if I missed an important list of orgs here.Somehow I still ended up sharing my mindmap with others, as it gives a clear visual overview of the orgs per main category or cause area. I know it is not perfect, but it is easy to maintain and people seem to like it. I was asked multiple times to add it to the forum, so here it is.Disclaimer Organisation inclusion doesn't imply my endorsement.The branches (the categories or cause areas) are a bit arbitrary, as some organisations serve multiple categories or cause areas. For me the aim was to get an overview, not a perfect mindmap.It's incomplete. I'm still adding orgs weekly. Feel free to add notes where this overview can be corrected or orgs can be added or deleted.I use the words orgs, organisations and entities in this post. That is because 'orgs' is more accessible and clear as a word, but the entities aren't all official organisations. I changed the title of the mindmap from EA(-aligned) to EA(-related), due to this comment. I'm still a bit uncomfortable with it, because there are many more EA-related orgs which won't fit all into this mindmap (see 80k jobboard), but it seems more right (for example: I [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Avi9XgSikH5BdHzKu/mindmap-with-overview-of-ea-organisations-via-tinyurl-com
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I have heard people who are uncertain about whether EA community building is the right move for them, given the increased prominence of AI Safety. I think that EA community building is the right choice for a significant number of people, and wanted to lay out why I believe this.AI Safety Community building seems importantI’m excited to see AI Safety specific community building and I hope it continues to grow. This piece is not intended to claim that no-one should be working on AIS community building. Although CEA’s groups team is at an EA organisation, not an AI-safety organisation. I hope we can collaborate with AI Safety groups, as:It would likely benefit both parties to synch on issues like data collectionI think there are lessons learned from EA community building that would be relevant and valuable to shareThe reasons that I think the case for AI Safety community building is strong, are:If we want people to work in AI Safety, directly talking about AI Safety seems the most straightforward way to do thisThere are talented people who will find the AI Safety framing attractive, but would not like the EA framingEarly AIS community building efforts have managed to attract significant numbers of talented individuals (although I don’t think it’s inevitable that these early wins will scale, or successfully avoid causing accidental harm)EA community building is also importantI think EA community building is still very valuable, for five reasonsEA groups have been successfulIn the 2020 EA and Longtermist survey, local groups were mentioned by 42% of respondentsI care about EA values in decision makers during crunch time. E.g., I think people in the EA movement have thought unusually deeply about what catastrophes would and wouldn’t lead to the loss of humanity’s future potentialHaving a compelling answer to the question “how do I do the most good” or “how do I live a good life” has been something that has historically attracted a lot of talent, and talent that would not necessarily have been attracted by AI Safety (conversely I expect AI Safety groups to attract people who wouldn’t be drawn to discussions of “how do I do the most good”)Specific, talented, organisers can be a better fit for either AIS or EA, and I want both options to existI think for both options to exist, both options need to have great organisers. If all of the best organisers went for a single option, I think the other option would either become irrelevant, or cease to exist.It seems important to note that it is still possible that the risks from AI don’t manifest in the way that EAs widely expect, in which case we’ll be glad that we have a network of people that care about EA ideasI want to see collaboration between EA and AIS community buildingAlthough this isn’t the reason I’d like to see AIS CB, there is an extra benefit: I think work on the most pressing problems could go better if EAs did not form a super-majority (but still a [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rcLDNmYcna5SLsELQ/why-ea-community-building
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We ended up talking for 8 hours, so I'm splitting this episode into 2 parts.This part is about Carl’s model of an intelligence explosion, which integrates everything from: how fast algorithmic progress & hardware improvements in AI are happening, what primate evolution suggests about the scaling hypothesis, how soon before AIs could do large parts of AI research themselves, and whether there would be faster and faster doublings of AI researchers, how quickly robots produced from existing factories could take over the economy.We also discuss the odds of a takeover based on whether the AI is aligned before the intelligence explosion happens, and Carl explains why he’s more optimistic than Eliezer.The next part, which I’ll release next week, is about all the specific mechanisms of an AI takeover, plus a whole bunch of other galaxy brain stuff. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iKWeQ7jhsZ8FrRDto/linkpost-dwarkesh-patel-interviewing-carl-shulman
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Executive summaryOne of the biggest challenges of being in a community that really cares about counterfactuals is knowing where the most important gaps are and which areas are already effectively covered. This can be even more complex with meta organizations and funders that often have broad scopes that change over time. However, I think it is really important for every meta organization to clearly establish what they cover and thus where these gaps are; there is a substantial negative flowthrough effect when a community thinks an area is covered when it is not. Why this mattersThe topic of having a transparent scope recently came up at a conference as one of the top concerns with many EA meta orgs. Some negative effects that have been felt by the community are in large part due to unclear scopes, including: Organizations leaving a space thinking it's covered when it's not. Funders reducing funding in an area due to an assumption that someone else is covering it when there are still major gaps.Two organizations working on the same thing without knowledge of each other, due to both having a broad mandate, but simultaneously putting resources into an overlapping subcomponent of this mandate.Talent being turned off or feeling misled by EA when they think an org misportrays itself. Talent ‘dropping out of the funnel’ when they go to what they believe is the primary organization covering an area and finding that what they care about isn’t covered, due to the organization claiming too broad a mandate.There can also be a significant amount of general frustration caused when people think an organization will cover, or is covering, an area and then an organization fails to deliver (often on something they did not even plan on doing). What do I mean when I say that organizations should have a transparent scope: Broadly, I mean organizations being publicly clear and specific about what they are planning to cover both in terms of action and cause area. In a relevant timeframe: I think this is most important in the short term (e.g., there is a ton of value in an organization saying what they are going to cover over the next 12 months, and what they have covered over the last months). For the most important questions: This clarity needs to both be in priorities (e.g., cause prioritization) and planned actions (e.g., working with student chapters). This can include things the organization might like or think is impactful to do but are not doing due to capacity constraints or its current strategic direction.For the areas most likely for people to confuse: It is particularly important to provide clarity about things that people think one might be doing (for example, Charity Entrepreneurship probably doesn’t need to clarify that it doesn’t sell flowers, but should really be transparent over whether it plans to incubate projects in a certain cause area or not). How to do thisWhen I have talked to organizations about this, I sometimes think that the “perfect” becomes the enemy of the good and they do not [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mzzPMrBjGpra2JSDw/ea-organizations-should-have-a-transparent-scope
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Power for Democracies is a new non-profit democracy charity evaluator based in Berlin, Germany, and operating globally. It was founded by Markus N. Beeko, currently secretary general of Amnesty International (Germany), together with Stephan Schwahlen and Stefan Shaw, founders of legacies.now, an EA-aligned philanthropic advisory in Munich, as well as co-founders (Stefan) and advisors (Stephan) at effektiv-spenden.org, the German language EA-aligned donation platform based in Berlin.Power for Democracies is looking to hire 5-6 democracy enthusiasts to form their ‘Knowledge & Research Team’. The objective of the team is twofold: To build and execute a ‘knowledge building roadmap’ that will lead to a growing set of methodologies for identifying highly effective pro-democracy interventions and promising NGOs to apply them. And to use these methodologies to generate giving recommendations for the international community of democracy-focused, effectiveness-driven donors. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B9wahjnGNvmLqQYD9/we-are-hiring-the-knowledge-and-research-team-power-for
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Epistemic Status: Low-to-medium confidence, informed by my experience with having a disability as an EA. I think the included recommendations are reasonable best practices, but I’m uncertain as to whether they would make a tangible change to perceptions of the EA movement. SummaryThe EA movement has historically faced criticism from disability rights advocates, potentially reducing support for EA and limiting its ability to do good. This tension between EA and disability advocacy may be as much a matter of poor EA communication around issues of disability as a matter of fundamental philosophical disagreement. Changes to communications practices regarding disability might therefore deliver major benefits for relatively little effort. Particular recommendations for improving communications include:Avoiding unnecessarily presenting EA and disability advocacy as being in oppositionBeing careful to only use DALYs when appropriate and when properly contextualizedIncreasing the quantity and diversity of EA writing on disability IntroductionThe Effective Altruism movement has had a somewhat contentious relationship with the disability advocacy community. Disability advocates have critiqued EA via protests, articles, and social media posts, arguing that the movement is ableist, eugenicist, and/or insufficiently attentive to the needs of disabled individuals. Yet the EA community is often substantially more inclusive than society at large for people with many disabilities, through aspects such as availability of remote work, social acceptance of specialized dietary needs, and provision of information in a wide variety of formats. Moreover, while there are some areas in which EA’s typical consequentialism may have fundamental conflicts with theories of disability justice, these areas are likely much more limited than many would assume. In fact, since people with disabilities tend to be overrepresented among those living in extreme poverty and/or experiencing severe pain, typical EA approaches that prioritize these problems are likely to be substantially net beneficial to the lives of disabled individuals. Given this context, I think it is likely that the conflict between disability advocates and effective altruists is as much a problem of poor EA communication as it is a problem of fundamental philosophical difference. This breakdown implies that conflicts between EAs and disability advocates might be substantially reduced via changes to EA communications practices. While changes to communication approaches carry some costs, I believe the benefits from improved communications around disability would probably outweigh them. There are three potential areas in which I think the status quo hurts the EA movement. First of all, it likely drives off potential donors, employees, and advocates with disabilities, reducing the resources with which the EA movement is able to do good. Second, it may prevent dialogue between the EA and disability advocacy communities that might productively identify effective interventions focused on people with disabilities. Finally, it may reduce support for the EA movement among the wider community of people who care about the interests and concerns of the disabled community. In comparison to these harms, I think the modest efforts required to improve on current EA communications around disability issues are likely to be noticeably less costly. In the next section, I identify three practical areas in which communications could likely be [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iAsepse4jx6zLH4tZ/improving-ea-communication-surrounding-disability
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At TBI, we have just written up a big report on AI policy. We cover a whole range of things around improving advice into government, increasing state capacity to deal with emerging AI challenges, and reforming things like public services and our data infrastructure for the AI age.But a big area of interest for this forum is our AI safety proposal for the UK. We propose creating AI Sentinel, a national laboratory effort focused on researching and testing safe AI, with the aim of becoming the “brain” for both a UK and an international AI regulator. Sentinel would recognise that effective regulation and control is and will likely remain an ongoing research problem, requiring an unusually close combination of research and regulation.Beneath is the copied party of the report that relates to this proposalThe UK should create a new national laboratory effort – here given a placeholder name of Sentinel – to test, understand and control safe AI, collaborating with the private sector and complementing its work. The long-term intention would be to grow this initiative into an international collaborative network. This will be catalysed by the UK embarking on a recruitment programme to attract the world’s best scientists to address AI-safety concerns.Such an effort should be open to international collaborators who could join the scheme, similar to the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. The UK is uniquely well positioned to do this due to the headquartering of Google DeepMind in London, which has drawn exceptional talent to the city. The EU has previously considered a similar effort but does not appear to have made progress yet; a contributing factor may be that the EU lacks the UK’s depth of AI talent. Sentinel could offer incentives for international collaboration in the form of knowledge and personnel sharing.This effort towards safe and interpretable forms of AI should be anchored by an elite public-sector physical laboratory, which has strong collaborative links with private companies. This would fill the space of the Alan Turing Institute in the UK but with a wider remit, markedly increased funding, and improved governance learning from the first New National Purpose report and Sir Paul Nurse’s recent review of the UK’s research, development and innovation landscape.This endeavour would have three related core objectives:Develop and deploy methods to interrogate and interpret advanced AI systems for safety, while devising regulatory approaches in tandem. This should also include development of measures to control and contain these systems, as well as design of new algorithms and models that may be more interpretable and controllable. Some starting-point evaluations do already exist, but part of Sentinel’s mission would be to work out which are the right evaluations, create new methods, as well as which can be public and which have to be private (to prevent future AI models from being trained on our evaluations and then being able to evade scrutiny). Built into the core mission of Sentinel is the expectation that it will focus on safety measures for the most capable current models.Keep the [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EBZggasznbotKrpLW/tony-blair-institute-ai-safety-work
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I’m Luke Freeman, and I currently serve as the executive director of Giving What We Can (GWWC). You’re welcome to ask me anything! I’ll start answering questions on Thursday June 15th.Logistics/practical instructions: Please post your questions as comments on this post. The earlier you share your questions, the easier it will be for me to get to them.Please upvote questions you'd most like answered.I’ll start answering questions on June 15th. Questions posted after that are less likely to get answers.I’m excited about this, but can’t commit to answering all the questions. If you want to share many questions, consider sharing and/or upvoting which ones you’re particularly interested in.(This is an “AMA” — you can explore others here.) Some context: I’ve been leading the team at Giving What We Can since 2020.I’ve been giving based on EA principles myself since about 2011 (pledger at both GWWC and Founders Pledge) and actively engaged with the EA community since 2016.GWWC is a community of effective givers who are on a mission to create a culture where giving effectively and significantly is a norm.GWWC hosts several giving pledges (best known for The Pledge to give 10% of lifetime earnings to effective charities), hosts a multi-country cause-diverse donation platform, provides advice on effective giving, and hosts popular tools and resources such as the How Rich Am I calculator, Giving Games and Charity Elections.GWWC does work to help support the broader effective giving community (e.g. information sharing, coordination and incubation of projects, research projects like evaluating the evaluators).GWWC helped to found the EA community and what is now called Effective Ventures Foundation (formerly Centre for Effective Altruism). I can speak about my experience running a project housed within EV.Read more about GWWC’s direction and strategyI’ve advocated for “big tent” effective altruism.I feel that EA could learn a lot from other sectors and could benefit from engaging more deeply with them.I feel strongly that effective giving should be a key part of effective altruism and likely has a broader appeal and accessibility.Prior to GWWC I worked predominantly in tech entrepreneurship and marketing (across private and public sectors) with a focus on growth.Outside of Giving What We Can I’ve been in leadership positions in Effective Altruism Australia, EAGxAustralia (organised two conferences) Good Ancestors Project & Good Ancestors Policy, Global Shapers Community (Sydney chapter), EA Sydney, Heart for the Homeless, Australian Skeptics, and advised or volunteered with various other social-impact focused projects.My academic background is in media and communications (did my thesis on political communication focusing on deliberative democracy and voting reform).Other than these things I’d be happy to talk about:Managing or working in a remote international team (based outside of EA hub cities) based in Australia.My experience going from employee #1 to larger teams (multiple times in different contexts).My experience volunteering and/or managing volunteersMy experience in for-purpose entrepreneurship.Challenges and strategies for mental/physical health and wellbeing (e.g. recovering from and mitigating burnout, managing EA/non-EA life, starting a family etc).My experiences coming from a non-typical academic background for EA leadership (e.g. not a major in philosophy, economics, or science).My views on EA topics/cruxes.Dropping out of [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CvhndEdp5yJwGpcXi/ama-luke-freeman-ed-of-giving-what-we-can-gwwc
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Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) is accepting applications for AI Safety / AI Assurance research grants. They are offering up to $750k per project accepted, expended over 6-24 months.1-2 page expression of interest due August 1. Applicants should be based at an academic institution or nonprofit research organization. More information here. From CSET "We’re using 'assurance' here in a broad sense, meaning roughly 'the generation of evidence that an ML system is sufficiently safe for its intended use.'" Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vz8wia5x8pk2fNLZk/less-than-usd750k-grants-for-general-purpose-ai-assurance
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The Alignment Research Center’s Theory team is starting a new hiring round for researchers with a theoretical background. Please apply here.What is ARC’s Theory team?The Alignment Research Center (ARC) is a non-profit whose mission is to align future machine learning systems with human interests. The high-level agenda of the Theory team (not to be confused with the Evals team) is described by the report on Eliciting Latent Knowledge (ELK): roughly speaking, we’re trying to design ML training objectives that incentivize systems to honestly report their internal beliefs.For the last year or so, we’ve mostly been focused on an approach to ELK based on formalizing a kind of heuristic reasoning that could be used to analyze neural network behavior, as laid out in our paper on Formalizing the presumption of independence. Our research has reached a stage where we’re coming up against concrete problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, and so we’re particularly excited about hiring researchers with relevant background, regardless of whether they have worked on AI alignment before. See below for further discussion of ARC’s current theoretical research directions.Who is ARC looking to hire?Compared to our last hiring round, we have more of a need for people with a strong theoretical background (in math, physics or computer science, for example), but we remain open to anyone who is excited about getting involved in AI alignment, even if they do not have an existing research record.Ultimately, we are excited to hire people who could contribute to our research agenda. The best way to figure out whether you might be able to contribute is to take a look at some of our recent research problems and directions:Some of our research problems are purely mathematical, such as these matrix completion problems – although note that these are unusually difficult, self-contained and well-posed (making them more appropriate for prizes).Some of our other research is more informal, as described in some of our recent blog posts such as Finding gliders in the game of life.A lot of our research occupies a middle ground between fully-formalized problems and more informal questions, such as fixing the problems with cumulant propagation described in Appendix D of Formalizing the presumption of independence.What is working on ARC’s Theory team like?ARC’s Theory team is led by Paul Christiano and currently has 2 other permanent team members, Mark Xu and Jacob Hilton, alongside a varying number of temporary team members (recently anywhere from 0–3).Most of the time, team members work on research problems independently, with frequent check-ins with their research advisor (e.g., twice weekly). The problems described above give a rough indication of the kind of research problems involved, which we would typically break down into smaller, more manageable subproblems. This work is often somewhat similar to academic research in pure math or theoretical computer science.In addition to this, we also allocate a significant portion of our time to higher-level questions surrounding research prioritization, which we often discuss at our weekly group meeting. Since the team is still small, we [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jwCym3zqbztA8qRZ4/arc-is-hiring-theoretical-researchers
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TL;DR: The EA movement should not use techniques that alienate people from the EA community as a whole if they do not align with a particular subgroup within the community. These approaches not only have an immediate negative impact on the EA community, but also have long-term repercussions on the sub-community utilizing them. Right now, the EA movement uses these sorts of tactics too often. People connect with the EA movement through many different channels, and often encounter sub-communities before they have a full understanding of the movement and the wide variety of opinions and viewpoints within it. These sub-communities can sometimes make the mistake of using "polarizing techniques". By this, I mean strategies that alienate people or burn bridges with the broader community. This could be from pushing a sub-perspective too hard, or being aggressively dismissive of other views.An example of this might be if I met a talented person at a party and they said they wanted to change to an impactful career, but had never heard of EA. If I then proceeded to aggressively push founding a charity through Charity Entrepreneurship (the organization) as a career path to them, to the point where they got turned off of EA altogether if they don’t come on board with my claims, I would consider that a polarizing approach: either they choose charity entrepreneurship as a path, or they don’t engage with effective altruism at all. Note that in the short term, all Charity Entrepreneurship really measures impact-wise is how many great charities get started, so a good person going into policy due to me connecting them to Probably Good means nothing to our organizational impact. Taken to an extreme, it might be worth pushing quite hard if I think that founding nonprofits is many times more important as a career path than policy. However, I think this style hurts both the community and Charity Entrepreneurship long-term. This phenomenon occurs across a diverse range of people, both in terms of funding and career transitions. Most often, it revolves around cause prioritization. It can be disappointing when someone does not share your enthusiasm for your preferred causes, but there is still a lot of value in directing them to the most impactful path they would in fact consider pursuing. The clearest way this technique is damaging, is that turning off someone from one part of the community often demotivates them to engage positively in other parts of the community. It makes them more likely to become an active critic instead of a neutral or contributing member of a different sub-community, or to the philosophy of effective altruism as a whole.Different sub-communities look for different types of people and resources. It's difficult for one person to have a bird's eye view on all sub-communities within EA, and it’s easy to overvalue your own community's certain needs or strengths. On numerous occasions, I have witnessed instances where one sub-community dismisses individuals possessing skills that would be immensely valuable in another segment of the community. It seems [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/viXCv8thAAd68Qnfs/effective-altruism-organizations-should-avoid-using
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Editorial noteThis report was produced by Rethink Priorities during December 2022 and January 2023. The project was commissioned and supported by Open Philanthropy, which does not necessarily endorse our conclusions.The report focuses on the development story and impact of some global health R&D ‘hits’ or ‘success stories’ of the last two decades: injectable artesunate, rectal artesunate, Coartem Dispersible, long-lasting insecticidal nets, and dolutegravir. We did not classify these developments as ‘hits’ ourselves, or compare them to any other treatments, but we were asked to look into them based on the expectation that they have saved or could save many lives, and could constitute some of the most successful treatments of the past couple of decades. We analyzed the steps that led to their development, with a particular focus on the roles different stakeholders played. Additionally, we estimated the number of deaths these products have averted to date and might avert in the future.We have tried to flag major sources of uncertainty in the report and are open to revising our views as more information becomes available.Executive summaryIn this report, we attempted to reconstruct the development story behind five global health R&D hits of the last two decades, four types of antimalarial treatments and one antiretroviral used for HIV, and estimate the number of deaths each of them has averted to date and might avert in total. The latter ranges from a few tens of thousands (for rectal artesunate) to a few million (for injectable artesunate and dolutegravir). You can find below two plots (Figures 1 and 2) summarizing our models’ estimates for the lives saved by each of these products since their introduction and until obsolescence (you can also find the plots and associated data here).Figure 1: Cumulative number of deaths averted by each product since its introductionFigure 2: Total number of deaths averted by each product until obsolescenceIn most of the examples studied, the drugs were developed through partnerships involving: (1) a pharmaceutical company that carried out the development of the product, (2) academics who ran the trials to show the product’s effects and/or compare it to the standard of care, and (3) philanthropic and public actors that provided funding for various stages. Philanthropic funds were also used in some cases to support local manufacturers and help them get WHO approval. One notable exception is dolutegravir, for which the development seems to have been entirely funded by industry.You can find here a table including the partners involved in the development of each of the products, and the cost and funders for different parts of the process where we were able to find the information. As noted above, philanthropic funds seem to have been pivotal to the development of all products except for dolutegravir. Even though the cost incurred by the pharmaceutical companies is unknown, and likely to be quite large, it seems as though these partnerships are quite frequent and necessary when developing products for diseases mainly affecting low and middle income countries.For all cases in which philanthropic funding [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WFeBgJb2GQWK6J2Do/historical-global-health-r-and-d-hits-development-main
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Editorial note and disclaimerThis report assesses the nonprofit Family Empowerment Media (FEM). The project was commissioned and supported by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. It was conducted in February 2023 over two weeks.This report attempts to estimate the cost-effectiveness of FEM, mainly relying on two existing cost-effectiveness analyses (from GiveWell and Founders Pledge). We were asked to look into the cost-effectiveness of the organization in an unbiased way, and we started the research without a prior for whether this organization would be cost-effective or not. In this report, we express cost-effectiveness as a function of the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers (like the original models mentioned above). We did not analyze the cost-effectiveness of any other family planning interventions, so we cannot and do not make any claims about how FEM compares to other family planning interventions.In addition to looking at the cost-effectiveness of FEM’s program, we describe their track record to date, and try to determine the main uncertainties about the program and its (cost-)effectiveness.We relied on four expert interviews to attempt to answer some of the questions: We interviewed Anna Christina Thorsheim (Executive Director and cofounder of FEM), Andrew Martin (Senior Research Analyst at GiveWell), Rosie Bettle (Applied Researcher at Founders Pledge), and Dr. Mukhtar Muhammad (medically trained expert in social and behavior change communication with a historical focus on family planning programming).We have tried to flag major sources of uncertainty in the report and are open to revising our views as more information becomes available.We would like to mention that Melanie Basnak previously worked at Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), the nonprofit organization that incubated FEM. Melanie did not overlap with Anna Christina Thorsheim during her time at CE and believes she oversaw this research in an unbiased manner.Executive summaryIn a randomized controlled trial in Burkina Faso from 2016-2018, a family planning mass media campaign led by the nonprofit Development Media International (DMI) led to a 5.9 percentage point (20%) increase in the modern contraceptive prevalence rate (mCPR), leading the study authors to estimate a cost effectiveness of $7.70 per couple-year protection, albeit with uncertainty. The nonprofit Family Empowerment Media (FEM) ran a pilot family planning mass media campaign in Kano, Nigeria, and they observed a 6 percentage point (75%) increase in mCPR using less rigorous pre- and post-pilot data comparisons. GiveWell conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of DMI’s intervention, finding it to be 1.1-5.4x the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers, depending on the context. FEM altered the model to pertain to its pilot intervention in Kano, finding that their intervention was ~27x the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers. Founders Pledge conducted a separate CEA, finding a cost-effectiveness of ~22x that of cash transfers, complete with a full (unpublished) report.We used the original models as a starting point to conduct our own cost-effectiveness estimation, tweaking certain values. In most cases, our adjustments would tend to increase these existing cost-effectiveness estimates, so we are confident that the cost-effectiveness of FEM’s intervention beats that of cash transfers, and we believe that their [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fGDN9xxrd8k7kZ2nf/family-empowerment-media-track-record-cost-effectiveness-and
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To what extent can humans forecast the impacts of superintelligent AGI?From one point of view, trying to understand superintelligence seems utterly intractable. Just as a dog or chimpanzee has little hope of comprehending the motivations and powers of humans, why should humans have any hope of comprehending the motivations and powers of superintelligence?But from another point of view, forecasting the impacts of superintelligence may yet be possible. The laws of reality that constrain us will similarly constrain any superintelligence. Even if a superintelligence achieves a more refined understanding of physics than us humans, it very likely won’t overturn laws already known. Thus, any inventions optimized against those physical laws, even if superior to our own, may end up looking familiar rather than alien.No matter how intelligent an AGI is, it will still be bound by physics. No matter how smart you are, you still must obey the law of conservation of energy. Just like us, an AGI wishing to affect the world will require an energy industry full of equipment to extract energy from natural sources. Just like us, its energy will have to come from somewhere, whether it’s the sun (solar, wind, biofuels, fossil fuels, hydro), the Earth (geothermal, nuclear), or the Moon (tidal, nuclear). Just like us, any heat engines will be limited by Carnot efficiency. Just like us, energy will need to be transported from where it is collected to where it is consumed, likely by electromagnetic fields in the presence of bound electrons (e.g., chemical fuels) or unbound electrons (e.g., electricity) or neither (e.g., lasers). If there are economies of scale, as there likely will be, that transportation will take place across networks with fractal network topologies, similar to our electric grids, roads, and pipelines. The physics of energy production are so constrained and so well understood that no matter what a superintelligence might build (even fusion electricity, or superconducting power lines, or wireless power), I suspect it will be something that humans had at least considered, even if our attempts were not as successful.One way to preview superintelligent AGI is to consider the superintelligent narrow AIs humanity has attempted to develop, such as chess AI.Lessons from chess AI: superintelligence is not omnipotenceIn 2017, DeepMind revealed AlphaZero. In less than 24 hours of (highly parallelized) training, it was able crush Stockfish, the reigning AI world chess champion. AlphaZero was trained entirely de novo, with no learning from human games and no human tuning of chess-specific parameters.AlphaZero is superhuman at chess. AlphaZero is so good at chess that it could defeat all of us combined with ease. Though the experiment has never been done, were we to assemble all the world’s chess grandmasters and give them the collective task of coming up with a single move a day to play against AlphaZero, I’d bet my life savings that AlphaZero would win 100 games before the humans won 1.From this point of view, AlphaZero is godlike.Its margin of strength over us is so great that even if the entire world teamed [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NPHJBby6KjDC7iNYK/what-can-superintelligent-ani-tell-us-about-superintelligent
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In this series, we consider AI safety organizations that have received more than $10 million per year in funding. There have already been several conversations and critiques around MIRI (1) and OpenAI (1,2,3), so we will not be covering them. The authors include one technical AI safety researcher (>4 years experience), and one non-technical community member with experience in the EA community. We’d like to make our critiques non-anonymously but believe this will not be a wise move professionally speaking. We believe our criticisms stand on their own without appeal to our positions. Readers should not assume that we are completely unbiased or don’t have anything to personally or professionally gain from publishing these critiques. We’ve tried to take the benefits and drawbacks of the anonymous nature of our post seriously and carefully, and are open to feedback on anything we might have done better.This is the second post in this series and it covers Conjecture. Conjecture is a for-profit alignment startup founded in late 2021 by Connor Leahy, Sid Black and Gabriel Alfour, which aims to scale applied alignment research. Based in London, Conjecture has received $10 million in funding from venture capitalists (VCs), and recruits heavily from the EA movement. We shared a draft of this document with Conjecture for feedback prior to publication, and include their response below. We also requested feedback on a draft from a small group of experienced alignment researchers from various organizations, and have invited them to share their views in the comments of this post.We would like to invite others to share their thoughts in the comments openly if you feel comfortable, or contribute anonymously via this form. We will add inputs from there to the comments section of this post, but will likely not be updating the main body of the post as a result (unless comments catch errors in our writing).Key TakeawaysFor those with limited knowledge and context on Conjecture, we recommend first reading or skimming the About Conjecture section. Time to read the core sections (Criticisms & Suggestions and Our views on Conjecture) is 22 minutes. Criticisms and SuggestionsWe think Conjecture’s research is low quality (read more). Their posts don’t always make assumptions clear, don’t make it clear what evidence base they have for a given hypothesis, and evidence is frequently cherry-picked. We also think their bar for publishing is too low, which increases the signal to noise ratio. Conjecture has acknowledged some of these criticisms, but not all (read more).We make specific critiques of examples of their research from their initial research agenda (read more).There is limited information available on their new research direction (cognitive emulation), but from the publicly available information it appears extremely challenging and so we are skeptical as to its tractability (read more).We have some concerns with the CEO’s character and trustworthiness because, in order of importance (read more):The CEO and Conjecture have misrepresented themselves to external parties multiple times (read more);The CEO’s involvement in EleutherAI and Stability AI has contributed to race dynamics (read more);The CEO [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gkfMLX4NWZdmpikto/critiques-of-prominent-ai-safety-labs-conjecture
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Crossposted on Medium here.Twitter: @lucreti_aFrom Lore Olympus.Thank you to the supportive EA members who encouraged me to publicly share this difficult experience, to my friends and research collaborators for your kindness, and to the courageous women who helped me in writing this post, who I hope can someday speak publicly.To those who know me, please call me Lucretia.This is a megapost. Each section has a distinct purpose and may evolve into its own standalone post. For the full picture, I recommend reading to the end. My cross-posted version on Medium is broken into sections for easier reading.0. OverviewIntroduction. I was one of the women who spoke to TIME magazine about sexual harassment and abuse in EA. Here is my story without media distortions.Advice for Female Founders and AI Researchers in the Valley. Silicon Valley can be a brutal place for women. This is what I wish I knew five years ago.My Case Study: I am an AI researcher. I believe my AI alignment research career was needlessly encumbered by:My experience with the sexually abusive red pill and pickup artist sphere, which entwined with a branch of AI safety in Cambridge, MA and Silicon Valley. I describe the unethical core of red pill ideology, including the running of “rape scripts.”The recent retaliation by a Silicon Valley AI community to my report of harm. This community’s aggressive reaction showed many gender biases latent in AI culture.Systemic Sexual Violence in Silicon Valley. I believe the male-dominated environment, nepotistic connections to investor money, extreme power disparities between wealthy AI researchers and aspiring young women in the AI and startup sectors, hacker house party culture, psychedelics misused as date rape drugs, cults of personality, substantial population of low empathy, risk-seeking, and/or narcissistic men, and lack of functional policing mechanisms make sexual violence a systemic problem in a critical X-risk industry.Why I Spoke to TIME. I address some misconceptions about the original TIME article on sexual harassment, and why I spoke to TIME in the first place.Helpful Books and Movies. I share learnings about sexual harassment and abuse after ~15 months of focusing on the problem, including my favorite books and movies about sexual harassment/abuse to flesh out more conceptual space. For all the seriousness of this post, these books and movies are entertaining, gorgeous, and healing!Future Sequences? Depending on the reactions to this post, I would love to write a Sequence of sexual harassment and abuse from first principles.Call to Action: Recovery and Litigation Funds. AGI should neither be built nor aligned in environments of deceit. We propose a call-to-action for a Recovery Fund and Sociological AI Alignment Fund / Litigation Fund to counteract the sexual predation Moloch in Silicon Valley, which is a sociological AI safety problem.AppendixExcerpts from red pill literatureNotes on Rape vs Consent Culture1. IntroductionSome recent posts on the EA forum have thoughtfully and earnestly addressed sexual harassment and abuse. Thank you to the EA community for your insightful posts and comments, and for genuinely trying to address the problem, which made [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LqjG4bAxHfmHC5iut/why-i-spoke-to-time-magazine-and-my-experience-as-a-female
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The AI Safety Fundamentals courses are one of the best ways to learn about AI safety and prepare to work in the field.BlueDot Impact facilitates the courses several times per year, and the curricula are available online for anyone to read. The “Alignment” curriculum is created and maintained by Richard Ngo (OpenAI), and the “Governance” curriculum was developed in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders. You can now listen to most of the core readings from both courses:We've also made narrations for some readings from the advanced “Alignment 201” course, and we may record more later this year:Apply to join the “AI Safety Fundamentals Governance Course” July cohort!Gain foundational knowledge for doing research or policy work on the governance of transformative AI.Successful applicants will participate in the AI Governance course with weekly virtual classes, and join the AI Safety Fundamentals community.Apply before 26th June 2023!https://apply.aisafetyfundamentals.com/governanceThoughts, feedback, suggestions?These narrations were created by Perrin Walker (TYPE III AUDIO) and Lukas Berglund on behalf of BlueDot Impact.We would love to hear your feedback. Do you find the narrations helpful? How could they be improved? What other AI safety material would you like to listen to? Please comment below, complete our feedback form, or write to team@type3.audio. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vxpqFFtrRsG9RLkqa/announcement-you-can-now-listen-to-the-ai-safety
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Something you hear a lot in discussions is that it's important not to strawman arguments: to assume they are much weaker than they are. This is uncharitable.Instead, the suggestion is you should steelman arguments: consider the strongest version of it, even if that's not what the person has said, and then evaluate that. Steelmanning is thought of as getting the principle of charity just right.However, I suspect there should be a third category, call it mithrilman: where arguments are treated as much stronger than they are, and you accept them even though you don't understand the reasons. For the non-nerds out there, mithril is Tolkien's fictional super-strong metal in Lord of the Rings. Whilst strawmanning is being too uncharitable, mithrilmanning is being too charitable. You don't want to do either. Goldilocks lies inbetwixt the two. I see mithrilmanning quite a lot among effective altruists. Usually, it goes something like this. People are discussing a view or argument they've heard person X make. The individuals are sitting around, brows furrowed, and struggling to find a good steelman of the argument: they can't work out what plausible reasons that person could have for their conclusion. After a while, even though they can't find a suitable steelman, someone says "Well, X does seem really smart, so...". Everyone nods. The conversation moves on.What's happened is that someone has suggested the group should defer, even though they can't follow the reasoning or provide it themselves. This seems to happen much more often when person X is important (not least because you don't want to risk looking stupid). I think there can be good cases where one should defer, but I'm worried I see too much of this. We should give people the benefit of the doubt - assume they are smart, thoughtful, etc. rather than fools - but we should still doubt. To err is human. We all make mistakes. We make progress by pointing those out. So, if you think someone is really smart, but you can't make sense of what they are thinking, at least hesitate on deferring to them. If possible, ask them to explain. It seems too charitable to assume they are right, not charitable enough to assume they are wrong. In assuming that they can give you a sensible answer, you are treating them with appropriate charity. I don't think I need to say why strawmanning is bad. The danger of mithrilmanning is you end up with too much deference, an information cascade and ultimately false beliefs. People end up believing what X says, even though no one really understands why. So, if you find yourself overhearing, or even saying yourself, "well, they do seem really smart..." consider adding "um, are we mithrilmanning this? We don't want to defer uncritically." Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/K85qGvjqnJbznNgiY/strawmen-steelmen-and-mithrilmen-getting-the-principle-of
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This post is a summary of some of my work as a field strategy consultant at Schmidt Futures' Act 2 program, where I spoke with over a hundred experts and did a deep dive into antimicrobial resistance to find impactful investment opportunities within the cause area. The full report can be accessed here.
Antimicrobials, the medicines we use to fight infections, have played a foundational role in improving the length and quality of human life since penicillin and other antimicrobials were first developed in the early and mid 20th century.
Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolve resistance to antimicrobials. As a result, antimicrobial medicine such as antibiotics and antifungals become ineffective and unable to fight infections in the body.
AMR is responsible for millions of deaths each year, more than HIV or malaria (ARC 2022). The AMR Visualisation Tool, produced by Oxford University and IHME, visualises IHME data which finds that 1.27 million deaths per year are attributable to bacterial resistance and 4.95 million deaths per year are associated with bacterial resistance, as shown below.
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https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W93Pt7xch7eyrkZ7f/cause-area-report-antimicrobial-resistance
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Introduction“News through prediction markets”The Base Rate Times is a nascent news site that incorporates prediction markets prominently into its coverage.Please see current iteration: www.baseratetimes.comTwitter: www.twitter.com/base_rate_timesWhat problem does it solve?Forecasts are underutilized by the mediaPrediction markets are more accurate than pundits, yet the media has made limited use of their forecasts. This is a big problem: one of the most rigorous information sources is being omitted from public discourse!The Base Rate Times creates prediction markets content, substituting for inferior news sources. This improves the epistemics of its audience.Forecasts are dispersed, generally inconvenient to consumePrediction markets are dispersed among many different platforms, fragmenting the information forecasters provide. For example, different platforms ask similar questions in different ways. Furthermore, platforms’ UX is orientated towards forecasters, not information consumers. Overall, trying to use prediction markets as ‘news replacement’ is cumbersome.There is value in aggregating and curating forecasts from various platforms. We need engaging ways of sharing prediction markets’ insights. The Base Rate Times aims to make prediction markets easily digestible to the general public.How does it work?News media (emotive narrative) vs Base Rate Times (actionable odds)For example, this is a real headline from a reputable newspaper: “Taiwan braces for China's fury over Pelosi visit”. Emotive and incendiary, it does not help you form an accurate model of the situation.By contrast, The Base Rate Times: “China-Taiwan conflict risk 14%, up 2x from 7% after Pelosi visit”. That's an actionable insight. It can inform your decision on whether to stay in Taiwan or to flee, for example.News aggregation, summarizing prediction marketsNaturally, the probabilities in the example above come from prediction markets. The Base Rate Times presents what prediction markets are telling us about news in an engaging way.Stories that shift market odds are highlighted. And if a seemingly important story doesn’t shift market odds, that also tells you something.On The Base Rate Times, right now you can see the latest odds on:Putin staying in powerRussian territorial gains in UkraineEscalation risk of NATO involvementand more...By glancing at a few charts, you can form a more accurate model (in less time) of Russia-Ukraine than reading countless narrative-based news stories.InspirationA key inspiration was Scott Alexander’s Prediction Market FAQ:I recently had to read many articles on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which all repeated that “rumors said” Twitter was about to go down because of his mass firing. Meanwhile, there were several prediction markets on whether this would happen, and they were all around 40%. If some journalist had thought to check the prediction markets and cite them in their article, they could have not only provided more value (a clear percent chance instead of just “there are some rumors saying this”), but also been right when everyone else was wrong.Also Scott’s 'Mantic Monday' posts and Zvi’s blog.This simple chart by @ClayGraubard was another inspiration. Wanted something like this, but for all major news stories. Couldn't find it, so making it myself. (Clay is making geopolitics videos and podcasts now, check it out.)GoalsLike 538, but for prediction marketsThe Base Rate Times is a bet that forecasts [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hChXEPPkDpiufCE4E/i-made-a-news-site-based-on-prediction-markets
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Epistemic status: some thoughts I wanted to get out quicklyA lot of fantastic work has been done by people in the AI existential risk research community and related communities over the last several months in raising awareness about risks from advanced AI. However, I have some cause for unease that I’d like to share.These efforts may have been too successful too soon.Or, more specifically, this level of outreach success this far ahead of the development of AI capable of posing existential risk may have fallout. We should consider steps to mitigate this. (1) TimelinesI know that there are well-informed people in the AI and existential risk communities who believe AI capable of posing existential risk may be developed within 10 years. I certainly can’t rule this out, and even a small chance of this is worth working to prevent or mitigate to the extent possible, given the possible consequences. My own timelines are longer, although my intuitions don’t have a rigorous model underpinning them (my intuitions line up similarly to the 15-40 year timelines mentioned in this recent blog post by Matthew Barnett from Epoch).Right now the nature of media communications means that the message is coming across with a lot of urgency. From speaking to lay colleagues, impressions often seem to be of short timelines (and some folks e.g. Geoff Hinton have explicitly said 5-20 years, sometimes with uncertainty caveats and sometimes without).It may be that those with short (<10 years) timelines are right. And even if they’re not, and we’ve got decades before this technology poses an existential threat, many of the attendant challenges – alignment, governance, distribution of benefits – will need that additional time to be addressed. And I think it’s entirely plausible that the current level of buy-in will be needed in order to initiate the steps needed to avoid the worst outcomes, e.g. recruiting expertise and resources to alignment, development and commitment to robust regulation, even coming to agreements not to pursue certain technological developments beyond a certain point. However, if short timelines do not transpire, I believe there’s a need to consider a scenario I think is reasonably likely.(2) Crying wolfI propose that it is most likely we are in a world where timelines are >10 years, perhaps >20 or 30 years. Right now this issue has a lot of the most prominent AI scientists and CEOs signed up, and political leaders worldwide committing to examining the issue seriously (examples from last week). What happens then in the >10 year-timeline world? The extinction-level outcomes that the public is hearing, and that these experts are raising and policymakers making costly reputational investments in, don’t transpire. What does happen is all the benefits of near-term AI that have been talked about, plus all the near-term harms that are being predominantly raised by the AI ethics/FAccT communities. Perhaps these harms include somewhat more extreme versions than what is currently talked about, but nowhere near catastrophic. Suddenly the year is 2028, and that whole 2023 furore is starting to look [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/weJZjku3HiNgQC4ER/a-note-of-caution-about-recent-ai-risk-coverage
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This post is a summary of some of my work as a field strategy consultant at Schmidt Futures' Act 2 program, where I spoke with over a hundred experts and did a deep dive into antimicrobial resistance to find impactful investment opportunities within the cause area. The full report can be accessed here.AMR is a global health priorityAntimicrobials, the medicines we use to fight infections, have played a foundational role in improving the length and quality of human life since penicillin and other antimicrobials were first developed in the early and mid 20th century.Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolve resistance to antimicrobials. As a result, antimicrobial medicine such as antibiotics and antifungals become ineffective and unable to fight infections in the body. AMR is responsible for millions of deaths each year, more than HIV or malaria (ARC 2022). The AMR Visualisation Tool, produced by Oxford University and IHME, visualises IHME data which finds that 1.27 million deaths per year are attributable to bacterial resistance and 4.95 million deaths per year are associated with bacterial resistance, as shown below.Figure 1: Composition of global bacterial infection related deaths, from AMR Visualisation ToolThis burden does not include that of non-bacterial infections, such as fungi or pathogens, which might increase this burden by several factors. For instance, every year, there are 150 million cases of severe fungal infections, which result in 1.7 million deaths annually (Kainz et al 2020). Unlike for bacterial infections, we do not have good estimates of how many of those are associated or attributable to resistance.Concerningly, AMR is escalating at an increasing rate (USA data, Swiss data, Mhondoro et al 2019, Indian Council of Medical Research 2021). One prominent report estimates that AMR will result in 10 million deaths every year by 2050 (Jim O’Neill report, 2014).Even more concerningly, we may be at a critical juncture, where if we do not drastically change our current trajectory, we could run out of effective antimicrobials. This would mean that our ability to perform surgery, give cancer patients chemotherapy, or manage chronic diseases like cystic fibrosis and asthma, all of which hinge on the effectiveness of antimicrobials, would be significantly impacted. The very foundations of modern medicine could be threatened; the WHO has warned that we could return to a pre-antibiotic age, which would result in the average human life expectancy going down from 70 to 50 (WHO, 2015).Beyond the health effects, there is a profound economic cost to AMR – for patients, healthcare systems and the economy. In the USA, the CDC estimates that the cost of AMR is $55 billion every year (Dadgostar 2019). Studies show that as a result of AMR, the annual global GDP could decrease by 1% and there would be a 5-7% loss in low and middle income countries by 2050 (Dadgostar 2019). In conjunction, the World Bank states that AMR might limit gains in poverty reduction, push more people into extreme poverty and have significant labour market effects.The importance of AMR is recognised by major governments and multilateral organisations. The WHO calls AMR [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W93Pt7xch7eyrkZ7f/cause-area-report-antimicrobial-resistance
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ALTER is an organization in Israel that works on several EA priority areas and causes. This semiannual update is intended to inform the community of what we have been doing, and provide a touchpoint for those interested in engaging with us. Since the last update at the beginning of 2023, we have made progress on a number of areas, and have ambitious ideas for future projects. Progress to DateSince its founding, ALTER has started and run a number of projects.Organized and managed an AI safety conference in Israel, AISIC 2022 hosted at the Technion, bringing in several international speakers including Stuart Russell, to highlight AI Safety focused on existential-risk and global-catastrophic-risk, to researchers and academics in Israel. This was successful in raising the profile of AI safety here in Israel, and in helping identify prospective collaborators and researchers.Support for Vanessa Kosoy’s Learning-Theoretic Safety Agenda, including an ongoing prize competition, and work to hire researchers working in the area.Worked with Israel’s foreign ministry, academics here in Israel, and various delegations to and organizations at the Biological Weapons Convention to find avenues to promote Israel’s participation.Launched our project to get the Israeli government to iodize salt, to mitigate or eliminate the current iodine deficiency that we estimate causes an expected 4-IQ point loss to the median child born in Israel today.Worked on mapping the current state of metagenomic sequencing usage in Israel, in order to prepare for a potential use of widespread metagenomic monitoring for detecting novel pathogens.Organized and hosted a closed Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky while he was visiting Israel, for 20 people in Israel working on or interested in contributing to AI safety. This was followed by a larger LessWrong meetup with additional attendees.Current and Ongoing WorkWe have a number of ongoing projects related to both biorisk and AI safety. Fellowship program. We have started this program to support researchers interested in developing research agendas relevant to AI safety. Ram Rahum is our inaugural funded AI safety fellow, who was found via our AI Safety conference. Since then, he has co-organized a conference in London on rebellion and disobedience in AI jointly with academics in Israel, the US, and the UK. As a fellow, he is also continuing to work with academics in Israel as well as a number of researchers at Deep Mind on understanding strategic deception and multi-agent games and dynamics for ML systems. His research home is here and monthly updates are here. Rona Tobolsky is a policy fellow, and is also working with us on policy, largely focused on biorisk and iodization.Support for Vanessa Kosoy’s Learning-Theoretic AI Safety Agenda. To replace the former FTX funding, we have been promised funding from an EA donor lottery to fund a researcher working on the learning-theoretic safety agenda. We are working on recruiting a new researcher, and are excited about expanding this. Relatedly, we are helping support a singular learning theory workshop. Biosecurity. David Manheim and Rona Tobolsky attended the Biological Weapons Convention - Ninth Review Conference, and have continued looking at ways to push for greater participation [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iykkkxvwcuySBeTEL/alter-israel-2023-mid-year-update
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Summary National[1] EA groups have a variety of strategies available to them, but many seem to focus on supporting local city groups as the main activity with less consideration of other interventions. I think this leads to neglecting more impactful activities for national groups. Potentially this is because they are following more established groups/resources where city groups are given as a default example. Most people interested in EA are not joining[2] local EA groups, and most people who could get more involved in EA don’t necessarily want to do that via joining a local group firstFrom EA London attendance data for 2016-18, out of ~1300 people roughly 75% attended just 1 event, and only 10% attended 4 or more which suggests that most weren't aiming to become regular membersThere is an unseen majority of people who know about EA and want to have more impact who are neglected by a city-first strategyEA should attract more people than those also looking for communityCommunity is still important, but should be seen as additional rather than a main focus Community can mean a lot of different things but I’m defining community in this post as a more densely connected subset of a network based around a locationIn practice this means a community is more likely to involve social gatherings, daily/weekly in person touchpointsA network will involve conferences, mentorship, newsletters/social media, monthly/yearly touchpoints There is probably value to having some city organisers if there is a critical mass of people interested in EA and the city has strong comparative advantages[3]Alternative strategies could include cause specific field building, career advising, supporting professional networks nationally, organisation incubation, translation Upside down lightbulb with a city insideThe Unseen MajorityWhen most people hear about EA for the first time, it’s usually via an online resource (80,000 Hours, GWWC, podcast) or word of mouth. The message they receive is that EA cares about having more impact and that EA as a movement is trying to help people have more impact.This can contrast to the experience of going along to a local group (which is regularly suggested as a good way to get more involved with EA), and experiencing the main message as ‘join our community’, with less focus on helping that person have impact. This could lead to people who are focused on generating a lot of impact bouncing away from EA. Anecdotally I have heard people say that they don’t find that much value from attending local group events but are still interested in EA and focus on having an impact in their career. For the subset of people who are looking for community, local groups can be great. But for a lot of people who do not have that preference/have other life circumstances, this isn’t what they are looking for. People already have communities they are a part of (family, friends, professional, hobbies) and often don’t have time for many more. Anecdotally from conversations with other organisers the people most likely to join are those looking for a community - students, recent graduates or people who are new to the city.This can be [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RfiEENFj8SaYty9Gj/national-ea-groups-shouldn-t-focus-on-city-groups
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Introduction“News through prediction markets”The Base Rate Times is a nascent news site that incorporates prediction markets prominently into its coverage.Please see current iteration: www.baseratetimes.comTwitter: www.twitter.com/base_rate_timesWhat problem does it solve?Forecasts are underutilized by the mediaPrediction markets are more accurate than pundits, yet the media has made limited use of their forecasts. This is a big problem: one of the most rigorous information sources is being omitted from public discourse!The Base Rate Times creates prediction markets content, substituting for inferior news sources. This improves the epistemics of its audience.Forecasts are dispersed, generally inconvenient to consumePrediction markets are dispersed among many different platforms, fragmenting the information forecasters provide. For example, different platforms ask similar questions in different ways. Furthermore, platforms’ UX is orientated towards forecasters, not information consumers. Overall, trying to use prediction markets as ‘news replacement’ is cumbersome.There is value in aggregating and curating forecasts from various platforms. We need engaging ways of sharing prediction markets’ insights. The Base Rate Times aims to make prediction markets easily digestible to the general public.How does it work?News media (emotive narrative) vs Base Rate Times (actionable odds)For example, this is a real headline from a reputable newspaper: “Taiwan braces for China's fury over Pelosi visit”. Emotive and incendiary, it does not help you form an accurate model of the situation.By contrast, The Base Rate Times: “China-Taiwan conflict risk 14%, up 2x from 7% after Pelosi visit”. That's an actionable insight. It can inform your decision on whether to stay in Taiwan or to flee, for example.News aggregation, summarizing prediction marketsNaturally, the probabilities in the example above come from prediction markets. The Base Rate Times presents what prediction markets are telling us about news in an engaging way.Stories that shift market odds are highlighted. And if a seemingly important story doesn’t shift market odds, that also tells you something.On The Base Rate Times, right now you can see the latest odds on:Putin staying in powerRussian territorial gains in UkraineEscalation risk of NATO involvementand more...By glancing at a few charts, you can form a more accurate model (in less time) of Russia-Ukraine than reading countless narrative-based news stories.InspirationA key inspiration was Scott Alexander’s Prediction Market FAQ:I recently had to read many articles on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which all repeated that “rumors said” Twitter was about to go down because of his mass firing. Meanwhile, there were several prediction markets on whether this would happen, and they were all around 40%. If some journalist had thought to check the prediction markets and cite them in their article, they could have not only provided more value (a clear percent chance instead of just “there are some rumors saying this”), but also been right when everyone else was wrong.Also Scott’s 'Mantic Monday' posts and Zvi’s blog.This simple chart by @ClayGraubard was another inspiration. Wanted something like this, but for all major news stories. Couldn't find it, so making it myself. (Clay is making geopolitics videos and podcasts now, check it out.)GoalsLike 538, but for prediction marketsThe Base Rate Times is a bet that forecasts [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hChXEPPkDpiufCE4E/i-made-a-news-site-based-on-prediction-markets
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The Initiative to abolish factory farming was a nationwide ballot in Switzerland, instigated by Sentience Politics.The contents of the postmortem below were written by Philipp Ryf, then co-president at Sentience Politics and co-lead of the campaign, for the 2022 annual report of Sentience Politics. The author of this post is Naoki Peter, co-president at Sentience Politics.The initiative at a glanceThe initiative demanded the abolition of factory farming in Switzerland, granting a maximum transitional period of 25 years.It aimed at anchoring stricter animal welfare guidelines as a new minimum standard in the Swiss constitution. These standards would have granted cows, pigs and chickens regular access to the outdoors and considerably more space.On behalf of Swiss farmers the initiative included import regulations that take account of the new Swiss standards. The initiative was rejected by a 62.9% majority of the voters on in September 2022.For more information see the initiative text (in German, French and Italian) and the ballot results.PostmortemThe living conditions of animals in agriculture have never been discussed so widely and publicly. Hundreds of thousands of people have engaged with the initiative beyond their usual scope, asking themselves the question: "What does my consumption mean for animals, people, and the environment?" The voting result has proven that the vision of a dignified, location-appropriate agriculture mobilises and moves people far beyond the base of the supporting parties.For the first time a broad alliance of Swiss animal protection, agricultural, and environmental organisations joined forces and stood up to the agricultural lobby to advocate for an animal welfare cause.Considering the high cost and resources required to launch an initiative, we aimed at including as many demands as possible. However, we now question whether a shorter, more targeted package of demands would have garnered more support. We will consider this for any future initiatives. In 2018 Sentience Politics launched the Initiative to abolish factory farming single-handedly. We should have prioritised alliance-building earlier. This would have enabled us to tap into the resources of more organisations. The opposition commanded resources which significantly exceeded our own. In order to have a realistic chance at the ballot box, any future initiative would likely require a substantially larger budget and campaign team.In order to inspire the majority of the population for a cause, it is essential to highlight the urgency of the matter and exclude any room for doubt. We could have done this better. For future campaigns, we must ensure that the actual conditions in animal farming are made transparent sooner. Possibilities include a greater focus on highlighting scandals, publishing our own investigations, and doing more to attract media exposure. Regional volunteer networks are very challenging to build. Here, we could have involved organisations that already have structures in place to manage regional leafleting, stand campaigns and billboards more effectively and at an earlier stage. We built up a large network of influential personalities from society. However, we lacked credible ambassadors from agriculture who could more readily be trusted as experts in their field until a late stage in the campaign. The [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gDRH2SrN34KdDvmHE/abolishing-factory-farming-in-switzerland-postmortem
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Link-post for two pieces I just wrote on the Extropians.The Extropians were an online group of techno-optimist transhumanist libertarians active in the 90s who influence a lot of online intellectual culture today, especially in EA and Rationalism. Prominent members include Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, Robin Hanson, Eric Drexler, Marvin Minsky and all three of the likely candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto (Hal Finney, Wei Dai, and Nick Szabo).The first piece is a deep dive into the archived Extropian forum. It was super fun to write and I was constantly surprised about how much of the modern discourse on AI and existential risk had already been covered in 1996.The second piece is a retrospective on predictions made by Extropians in 1995. Eric Drexler, Nick Szabo and 5 other Extropians give their best estimates for when we'll have indefinite biological lifespans and reproducing asteroid eaters. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FrukYXHBSaZvb7f9Q/a-double-feature-on-the-extropians
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I have released a new episode of my podcast, EA Critiques, where I interview David Thorstad. David is a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute and also writes about EA on his blog, Reflective Altruism.In the interview we discuss three of his blog post series:Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils: Based on his academic paper of the same name, David argues that there is a surprising tension between the idea that there is a high probability of extinction (existential risk pessimism) and the idea that the expected value of the future, conditional on no existential catastrophe this century, is astronomically large.Exaggerating the risks: David argues that the probability of an existential catastrophe from any source is much lower than many EAs believe. At time of recording the series only covered risks from climate change, but future posts will make the same case for nuclear war, pandemics, and AI.Billionaire philanthropy: Finally, we talk about the the potential issues with billionaires using philanthropy to have an outsized influence, and how both democratic societies and the EA movement should respond.As always, I would love feedback, on this episode or the podcast in general, and guest suggestions. You can write a comment here, send me a message, or use this anonymous feedback form. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/riYnjstGwK7hREfRo/podcast-interview-with-david-thorstad-on-existential-risk
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The study was published in Nature on May 31st, 2023.Key Points:Cash transfer programs had the following observed effects:Deaths among women fell by 20%Largely driven by decreases in pregnancy-related deathsDeaths among children less than 5 fell by 8%No association between cash transfer programs and mortality among menTemporal analyses suggest reduction in mortality among men over time, and specific subgroup analysis (rather than population wide) found a 14% morality reduction among men aged 18-4037 low and middle income countries studied, population wide4,325,484 in the adult dataset2, 867,940 in the child dataset No apparent differences between the effects of unconditional and conditional cash transfersFactors that lead to larger reductions in mortality: Programs with higher coverage and larger cash transfer amounts Countries with higher regulatory quality ratingsCountries with lower health expenditures per capitastronger association in sub-Saharan Africa relative to outside sub-Saharan AfricaCitation: Richterman, A., Millien, C., Bair, E.F. et al. The effects of cash transfers on adult and child mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06116-2 Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/acBFLTsRw3fqa8WWr/large-study-examining-the-effects-of-cash-transfer-programs
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Introduction
To me, it is obvious that veganism introduces challenges to most people. Solving the challenges is possible for most but not all people, and often requires trade-offs that may or may not be worth it. I’ve seen effective altruist vegan advocates deny outright that trade-offs exist, or more often imply it while making technically true statements. This got to the point that a generation of EAs went vegan without health research, some of whom are already paying health costs for it, and I tentatively believe it’s harming animals as well.
Discussions about the challenges of veganism and ensuing trade-offs tend to go poorly, but I think it’s too important to ignore. I’ve created this post so I can lay out my views as legibly as possible, and invite people to present evidence I’m wrong.
One reason discussions about this tend to go so poorly is that the topic is so deeply emotionally and morally charged. Actually, it’s worse than that: it’s deeply emotionally and morally charged for one side in a conversation, and often a vague irritant to the other. Having your deepest moral convictions treated as an annoyance to others is an awful feeling, maybe worse than them having opposing but strong feelings. So I want to be clear that I respect both the belief that animals can suffer and the work advocates put into reducing that suffering. I don’t prioritize it as highly as you do, but I am glad you are doing (parts of) it.
But it’s entirely possible for it to be simultaneously true that animal suffering is morally relevant, and veganism has trade-offs for most people. You can argue that the trade-offs don’t matter, that no cost would justify the consumption of animals, and I have a section discussing that, but even that wouldn’t mean the trade-offs don’t exist.
This post covers a lot of ground, and is targeted at a fairly small audience. If you already agree with me I expect you can skip most of this, maybe check out the comments if you want the counter-evidence. I have a section addressing potential counter-arguments, and probably most people don’t need to read my response to arguments they didn’t plan on making. Because I expect modular reading, some pieces of information show up in more than one section. Anyone reading the piece end to end has my apologies for that.
However, I expect the best arguments to come from people who have read the entire thing, and at a minimum the “my cruxes” and “evidence I’m looking for” sections. I also ask you to check the preemptive response section for your argument, and engage with my response if it relates to your point. I realize that’s a long read, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours on this, including providing nutritional services to veg*ns directly, so I feel like this is a reasonable request.
My cruxes
Below are all of the cruxes I could identify for my conclusion that veganism has trade-offs, and they include [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Lv4NyFm2aohRKJCH/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one
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This is partly based on my experiences working as a Program Officer leading Open Phil’s Longtermist EA Community Growth team, but it’s a hypothesis I have about how some longtermists could have more of an impact by their lights, not an official Open Phil position.Context: I originally wrote this in July 2022 as a memo for folks attending a retreat I was going to. I find that I refer to it pretty frequently and it seems relevant to ongoing discussions about how much meta effort done by EAs should focus on engaging more EAs vs. other non-EA people. I am publishing it with light-ish editing, and some parts are outdated, though for the most part I more strongly hold most of the conclusions than I did when I originally wrote it. Tl;dr: I think that recruiting and talent pipeline work done by EAs who currently prioritize x-risk reduction (“we” or “us” in this post, though I know it won’t apply to all readers) should put more emphasis on ideas related to existential risk, the advent of transformative technology, and the ‘most important century’ hypothesis, and less emphasis on effective altruism and longtermism, in the course of their outreach. A lot of EAs who prioritize existential risk reduction are making increasingly awkward and convoluted rhetorical maneuvers to use “EAs” or “longtermists” as the main label for people we see as aligned with our goals and priorities. I suspect this is suboptimal and, in the long term, infeasible. In particular, I’m concerned that this is a reason we’re failing to attract and effectively welcome some people who could add a lot of value. The strongest counterargument I can think of right now is that I know of relatively few people who are doing full-time work on existential risk reduction on AI and biosecurity who have been drawn in by just the “existential risk reduction” frame [this seemed more true in 2022 than 2023]. This is in the vein of Neel Nanda’s "Simplify EA Pitches to "Holy Shit, X-Risk"" and Scott Alexander’s “Long-termism vs. Existential Risk”, but I want to focus more on the hope of attracting people to do priority work even if their motivations are neither longtermist nor neartermist EA, but instead mostly driven by reasons unrelated to EA. EA and longtermism: not a crux for doing the most important workRight now, my priority in my professional life is helping humanity navigate the imminent creation of potential transformative technologies, to try to make the future better for sentient beings than it would otherwise be. I think that’s likely the most important thing anyone can do these days. And I don’t think EA or longtermism is a crux for this prioritization anymore. A lot of us (EAs who currently prioritize x-risk reduction) were “EA-first” — we came to these goals first via broader EA principles and traits, like caring deeply about others; liking rigorous research, scope sensitivity, and expected value-based reasoning; and wanting to meet others with similar traits. Next, we were exposed to a cluster of philosophical and empirical arguments about [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cP7gkDFxgJqHDGdfJ/ea-and-longtermism-not-a-crux-for-saving-the-world
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Apply to participate or facilitate, before 25th June 2023.We are looking for people who currently or might want to work in AI Governance and policy. If you have networks in or outside of EA who might be interested, we would appreciate you sharing this course with them.Full announcementThe AI Safety Fundamentals (AISF): Governance Course is designed to introduce the key ideas in AI Governance for reducing extreme risks from future AI systems.Alongside the course, you will be joining our AI Safety Fundamentals Community. The AISF Community is a space to discuss AI Safety with others who have the relevant skills and background to contribute to AI Governance, whilst growing your network and awareness of opportunities.The last time we ran the AI Governance course was in January 2022, then under Effective Altruism Cambridge. The course is now run by BlueDot Impact, founded by members of the same team (and now based in London).We are excited to relaunch the course now, when AI Governance is a focal point for the media and political figures. We feel this is a particularly important time to support high-fidelity discussion of ideas to govern the future of AI.Note we have also renamed the website from AGI Safety Fundamentals to AI Safety Fundamentals. We'll release another post within the next week to explain our reasoning, and we'll respond to any discussion about the rebrand there.Apply here, by 25th June 2023.Time commitmentThe course will run for 12 weeks from July-September 2023. It comprises 8 weeks of reading and virtual small-group discussions, followed by a 4-week project.The time commitment is around 5 hours per week, so you can engage with the course and community alongside full-time work or study. The split will be 2-3 hours of preparatory work, and a 1.5-2 hour live session.Course structureThe course is 12 weeks long and takes around 5 hours a week to participate in.For the first 8 weeks, participants will work through 2-3 hours of structured content to prepare for a weekly, facilitated small discussion group of 1.5-2 hours. Participants will be grouped depending on their current career stage and policy expertise. The facilitator will be knowledgeable about AI Governance, and can help to answer participants’ questions and point them to further resources.The final 4 weeks are project weeks. Participants can use this time to synthesise their views on the field and start thinking through how to put these ideas into practice, or start getting relevant skills and experience that will help them with the next step in their career.The course content is designed with input from a wide range of the community thinking about the governance of advanced AI. The curriculum will be updated before the course launches in mid-July.Target audienceWe think this course will particularly be able to help participants who:Have policy experience, and are keen to apply their skills to reducing risk from AI.Have a technical background, and want to learn about how they can use their skills to contribute to AI Governance.Are early in their career or a student who is interested in [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bsbf4am9paoTq8Lrb/applications-open-for-ai-safety-fundamentals-governance
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I’m excited to share that Lincoln Quirk has joined the board of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK). This follows the addition of Zach Robinson and Eli Rose to the EV US board about two months ago.Lincoln is a co-founder and Head of Product at Wave, a technology company that aims to make finance more accessible in Africa through digital infrastructure. Wave spun off from SendWave, a remittance platform which Lincoln also cofounded and which was acquired in 2021. He has maintained a deep interest in effective altruism and been a part of the EA community for over a decade.In his own words, "I'm excited to join the EV UK board. I've been trying to help the world and have called myself part of the EA community for 10+ years; EV is playing one of the most important roles in this community and correspondingly holds a lot of responsibility. I'm looking forward to helping figure out the best ways EV can contribute to making the world a better place through enabling EA community and EA projects.”The EV UK trustees and I are excited to have Lincoln join and look forward to working with him. Lincoln impressed us during the interview process with his strategic insight and dedication to the role. I also think his experience founding and growing Wave and Sendwave will be a particularly useful perspective to add to the board.We are continuing to look for candidates to add to the boards of both EV UK and EV US, especially candidates with diverse backgrounds and experiences, and who have experience in accounting, law, finance, risk management or other management at large organizations. We recruited Lincoln via directly reaching out to him, and plan to continue to source candidates this way and via our open call. If you are interested or know of a great candidate, the linked forum post includes instructions for applying or nominating someone. Applications and nominations will be accepted until June 4th. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NK5mDoedYeuorhkAf/lincoln-quirk-has-joined-the-ev-uk-board
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From late 2020 to last month, I worked at grassroots-level non-profits in operational roles. Over that time, I’ve seen surprisingly effective deployments of strategies that were counter-intuitive to my EA and rationalist sensibilities.I spent 6 months being the on-shift operations manager at one of the five largest food banks in Toronto (~50 staff/volunteers), and 2 years doing logistics work at Samaritans (fake name), a long-lived charity that was so multi-armed that it was basically operating as a supplementary social services department for the city it was in(~200 staff and 200 volunteers). Both of these non-profits were well-run, though both dealt with the traditional non-profit double whammy of being underfunded and understaffed.Neither place was super open to many EA concepts (explicit cost-benefit analyses, the ITN framework, geographic impartiality, the general sense that talent was the constraining factor instead of money, etc). Samaritans in particular is a spectacular non-profit, despite(?) having basically anti-EA philosophies, such as:Being very localist; Samaritans was established to help residents of the city it was founded in, and now very specialized in doing that.Adherence to faith; the philosophy of The Catholic Worker Movement continues to inform the operating choices of Samaritans to this day.A big streak of techno-pessimism; technology is first and foremost seen as a source of exploitation and alienation, and adopted only with great reluctance when necessary.Not treating money as fungible. The majority of funding came from grants or donations tied to specific projects or outcomes. (This is a system that the vast majority of nonprofits operate in.)Once early on I gently pushed them towards applying to some EA grants for some of their more EA-aligned work, and they were immediately turned off by the general vibes of EA upon visiting some of its websites. I think the term “borg-like” was used.Over this post, I’ll be largely focusing on Samaritans as I’ve worked there longer and in a more central role, and it’s also a more interesting case study due to its stronger anti-EA sentiment.Things I LearnedLong Term Reputation is PricelessNon-Profits Shouldn’t Be IslandsSlack is Incredibly PowerfulHospitality is Pretty ImportantFor each learning, I have a section for sketches for EA integration – I hesitate to call them anything as strong as recommendations, because the point is to give more concrete examples of what it could look like integrated in an EA framework, rather than saying that it’s the correct way forward.1. Long Term Reputation is PricelessInstitutional trust unlocks a stupid amount of value, and you can’t buy it with money. Lots of resources (amenity rentals; the mayor’s endorsement; business services; pro-bono and monetary donations) are priced/offered based on tail risk. If you can establish that you’re not a risk by having a longstanding, unblemished reputation, costs go way down for you, and opportunities way up. This is the world that Samaritans now operate in.Samaritans had a much better, easier time at city hall compared to newer organizations, because of a decades-long productive relationship where we were really helpful with issues surrounding unemployment and homelessness. Permits get [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5oTr4ExwpvhjrSgFi/things-i-learned-by-spending-five-thousand-hours-in-non-ea
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tl;dr: create an equivalent of GWWC for building career capital. We've thought about this idea for ~15 minutes and are unlikely to do something ourselves, but wanted to share it because we think it might be good.Many people's greatest path to impact is through changing their careerBut for a lot of these people, particularly those earlier in their career, it doesn't make sense to immediately apply to impact-oriented jobs. Instead, it's better for them to build career capital at non-impact-oriented workplaces, i.e. "earning to learn"It would be nice if there was some equivalent of the Giving What We Can pledge for thisIt could involve something like pledging to:Spend at least one day per year updating your career plan with an eye towards impactApply to at least x impact-oriented jobs per year, even if you expect to get rejectedAnd some sort of dashboard checking people's adherence to this, and nudging them to adhere betterSome potential benefits:Many people who have vague plans of "earning to learn" just end up drifting away after entering the mainstream workforce; this can help them stay engagedIt might relieve some of the pressure around being rejected from "EA jobs" – making clear that Official Fancy EA People endorse career paths beyond "work at one of this small list of organizations" puts less pressure on people who aren't a good fit for one of those small list of organizationsRelatedly, it gives community builders a thing to suggest to a relatively broad set of community members which is robustly goodNext steps:I think the MVP here requires ~0 technology: come up with the pledge, get feedback on it, and if people are excited throw it into a Google formIt's probably worth reading criticisms of the GWWC pledge (e.g. this) to understand some of the failure modes here and be sure you avoid thoseIt also requires thinking through some of the risks, e.g. you might not want a fully public pledge since that could hurt people's job prospectsIf you are interested in taking on this project, please contact one of us and we can try to help Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qnYm5MtBJcKyvYvfo/an-earn-to-learn-pledge
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TL;DREverything that looks like exponential growth eventually runs into limits and slows down. AI will quite soon run into limits of compute, algorithms, data, scientific progress, and predictability of our world. This reduces the perceived risk posed by AI and gives us more time to adapt.DisclaimerAlthough I have a PhD in Computational Neuroscience, my experience with AI alignment is quite low. I haven’t engaged in the field much except for reading Superintelligence and listening to the 80k Hours podcast. Therefore, I may duplicate or overlook arguments obvious to the field or use the wrong terminology.IntroductionMany arguments I have heard around the risks from AI go a bit like this: We will build an AI that will be as smart as humans, then that AI will be able to improve itself. The slightly better AI will again improve itself in a dangerous feedback loop and exponential growth will ultimately create an AI superintelligence that has a high risk of killing us all.While I do recognize the other possible dangers of AI, such as engineering pathogens, manipulating media, or replacing human relationships, I will focus on that dangerous feedback loop, or “exponential AI takeoff”. There are, of course, also risks from human-level-or-slightly-smarter systems, but I believe that the much larger, much less controllable risk would come from “superintelligent'' systems. I’m arguing here that the probability of creating such systems via an “exponential takeoff” is very low.Nothing grows exponentially indefinitelyThis might be obvious, but let’s start here: Nothing grows exponentially indefinitely. The textbook example for exponential growth is the growth of bacteria cultures. They grow exponentially until they hit the side of their petri dish, and then it’s over. If they’re not in a lab, they grow exponentially until they hit some other constraint but in the end, all exponential growth is constrained. If you’re lucky, actual growth will look logistic (”S-shaped”), where the growth rate approaches 0 as resources are eaten up. If you’re unlucky, the population implodes.For the last decades, we have seen things growing and growing without limit, but we’re slowly seeing a change. Human population is starting to follow an S-curve, the number of scientific papers has been growing fast but is starting to flatten out, and even Silicon Valley has learnt that Metcalfe’s Law of exponential network benefits doesn’t work due to the limits imposed by network complexity.I am assuming that everybody will agree with the general argument above, but the relevant question is: When will we see the “flattening” of the curve for AI? Yes, eventually growth is limited, but if that limit kicks in once AI has used up all the resources of our universe, that’s a bit too late for us. I believe that the limits will kick in as soon as AI will reach our level of knowledge, give or take a magnitude, and here is why:We’re reaching the limits of Moore’s lawFirst and foremost, the growth of processing power is what enabled the growth of AI. I’m not going to guess when we reach [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wY6aBzcXtSprmDhFN/exponential-ai-takeoff-is-a-myth
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- IntroductionAn essay being worth $50,000 dollars is a bold claim, so here is another— the person best equipped to adjust your AI existential risk predictions is the 18th-century Scottish historian David Hume.Eliezer Yudkowsky has used Hume’s is-ought problem to argue that it’s possible, in principle, for powerful AI agents to have any goals. Even a system with cognitive mastery over “is” data requires a framework for “ought” drives to be defined, as the transition from factual knowledge to value-driven objectives is not inherently determined. Bluntly, Eliezer writes that “the world is literally going to be destroyed because people don't understand Hume's is-ought divide. Philosophers, you had ONE JOB.”As a student of Hume, I think this is a limited picture of what he has to offer this conversation. My goal, however, is not to refute Eliezer’s example or to even engage in x-risk debates at the level of a priori reasoning. Hume’s broader epistemological and historical writing critiques this method. Hume was not a lowercase-r rationalist. He thought knowledge was derived from experiences and warned that it’s easy to lead yourself astray with plausible sounding abstractions. If you are a capital-R Rationalist, I will argue you should review your foundational epistemological assumptions, because even a small update may ripple out to significantly greater uncertainty about existential risk from AI.The central premises in Hume’s thought that I think you should consider are:All knowledge is derived from impressions of the external world. Our ability to reason is limited, particularly about ideas of cause and effect with limited empirical experience.History shows that societies develop in an emergent process, evolving like an organism into an unknown and unknowable future. History was shaped less by far-seeing individuals informed by reason than by contexts which were far too complex to realize at the time.In this essay, I will argue that these premises are true, or at least truer than the average person concerned about existential risk from AI holds them to be. I hope David Hume can serve as a guide to the limits of “arguing yourself” into any strong view of the future based on a priori reasoning. These premises do not mean that AI safety should be ignored, but they should unsettle strong/certain views.The best practical example of premise #1 is Anthropic’s description of “empiricism in AI safety.” Anthropic does argue that there is evidence AI will have a large impact, that we do not know how to train systems to robustly behave well, and that “some scary, speculative problems might only crop up” once AI systems are very advanced. Yet they caution that “the space of possible AI systems, possible safety failures, and possible safety techniques is large and difficult to traverse from the armchair alone.” Anthropic is committed to AI safety, but within an empiricist epistemology. Their portfolio approach is built upon uncertainty: “Some researchers who care about safety are motivated by a strong opinion on the nature of AI risks. Our experience is that even predicting the behavior and properties of AI systems in the near future is very difficult. Making [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MDkYSuCzFbEgGgtAd/ai-doom-and-david-hume-a-defence-of-empiricism-in-ai-safety
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Big mistakes = Doing something that is actively harmful or useless by their own lights and values, i.e. doesn't help them achieve their life goals. (Not: Doing something that isn't in line with your values and goals.)A lot of people think that others in the EA-ish community are trying to do something impactful but end up doing something harmful or useless. Sometimes they also work on something that they are just not very good at or make other big mistakes. A lot of people never end up telling the other person that they think they are making big mistakes. Sometimes people also just have one particular argument for why the other might do harmful or useless work but not be sure whether it's a bad overall. This also often goes unsaid.I think that's understandable and also bad or at least very costly.Epistemic status: Speculation/rant. I know of another person who might post something in this topic that is much more rigorous and has actual background research.Upsides of telling others you think they are making big mistakes, wasting their time, or doing harm:It's good on a community level because people get information that's useful to decide how to achieve their goals (among them, having impact,) so people end up working on less suboptimal things and the community has better impact overall.It's good on a community level because it's pushes towards good intellectual conversations and progress.I and probably others find it stressful because I can't rely on others telling me if they think I'm doing a bad job, so I have to try to read between the lines. (I find it much less stressful now but when I was more insecure about my competence, I found it really stressful. I think one of my main concerns was others thinking and saying I'm "meh" or "fine" (with an unenthusiastic tone) but only behind my back.)Note that anxiety works differently for different people though and some people might find the opposite is true for them. See reasons against telling people that you think they are wasting their time or worse.I and probably others find it pretty upsetting that I can't rely on others being honest with me. It's valuable information and I would like people to act in a way that helps me achieve my stated goals (in this case, doing good), especially if their motivation for not being honest with me is protecting my wellbeing.That said, I often don't do a great job at this myself and think telling others you think their efforts would be better spent elsewhere also has significant costs, both personal and on a community level.Downsides of telling others you think they are making big mistakes, wasting their time, or doing harm:Hearing that somebody thinks you're doing harmful or useless work can be extremely discouraging and can lead people to over-update, especially if they are insecure anyway. (Possibly because people do it so rarely, so the signal can be interpreted as stronger than it's intended.)At the same time, we [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fMCnMCMSEjanhAwpM/probably-tell-your-friends-when-they-make-big-mistakes
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The Global Innovation Fund (GIF) is a non-profit, impact-first investment fund headquartered in London that primarily works with mission-aligned development agencies (USAID, SIDA, Global Affairs Canada, UKAID). Through grants, loans and equity investments, they back innovations with the potential for social impact at a large scale, whether these are new technologies, business models, policy practices or behavioural insights.Recently, they made a bold but little publicized projection in their 2022 Impact Report (page 18): "We project every dollar that GIF has invested to date will be three times as impactful as if that dollar had been spent on long-lasting, insecticide-treated bednets... This is three times higher than the impact per dollar of Givewell’s top-rated charities, including distribution of anti-malarial insecticide-treated bednets. By Givewell’s estimation, their top charities are 10 times as cost-effective as cash transfers."This is a short post to highlight GIF's projection to the EA community and to invite comments and reactions.Here are a few initial points:It's exciting to see an organization with relatively traditional funders comparing its impact to GiveWell's top charities (as well as cash transfers).I would want to see more information on how they did their calculations before taking a view on their projection.In any case, based on my conversations with GIF, and what I've understood about their methodology, I think their projection should be taken seriously. I can see ways it could be either an overestimate or an underestimate. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zuoYcZJh5FEywpvzA/global-innovation-fund-projects-its-impact-to-be-3x-givewell
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Hi Everyone - partly inspired by attending the recent EA Global London conference a couple of weeks ago, I've written a CGD Blog with some thoughts on EA's approach to prioritisation and methods in health economics (specifically Health Technology Assessment). This is a link post and as CGD staff I have to post on our platform, but since the key target audience is EAs, I'd be delighted to hear thoughts from this community. I'll be sure to monitor the comments section and perhaps the discussion will feed into future work. The differences between EA and health econ I highlight include:1. Approaches generalising cost-effectiveness evidence 2. Going beyond cost-effectiveness in determining value3. Deliberative appraisal4. Institutionalisation of a participatory processPlease click through for the full blog. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3KuCzHJHCz99sf3ZB/beyond-cost-effectiveness-insights-for-effective-altruism
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TL;DRThe death toll of tobacco dwarfs traditional EA global health focuses (e.g. Malaria).Taxing tobacco is the most effective and yet most neglected form of reducing tobacco consumption.Multiple EA orgs have ran cost-effectiveness numbers that would put a tobacco taxation NGO on GiveWell’s list (both in expected value and contingent on success) and even at the top in some cases.Despite this, no enduring tobacco-taxation advocacy organization has emerged from EA (which would be the only advocacy organization in the world exclusively dedicated to tobacco taxation)Join Joel Tan (Founder of CEARCH) and J.T. Stanley, who as incubatees of Charity Entrepreneurship closely examined tobacco taxation, on June 10th (Saturday) at 14:00 UTC for a virtual discussion about the intervention and what’s next to make it a reality.Thanks to Moritz von Knebel for providing feedback on the draft.Yes, I cite WHO a lot. Not all WHO citations are the same WHO link FYI.Problem spaceTobacco kills over 8 million individuals a year—that’s 13x Malaria (WHO) (CDC).Another way of framing it: annually more people are killed by tobacco usage than malaria, HIV, and neonatal deaths combined… twice over. And while the death toll of the latter three has been decreasing over time, death from tobacco is increasing.Of the 8 million deaths, 1.2 million are bystanders killed from secondhand smoking (WHO).Facts not related to death:Tobacco consumption displaces productive forms of spending. Tobacco consumes 1.5 to 17% (with a rough median around 4.5%) of a person’s income depending on country and socioeconomic status (table of results) (de Beyer et al., 2001). Spending on tobacco typically displaces spending on education and nutrition in low-income households (John, 2008) (Nonnemaker and Sur, 2007) (Pu et al., 2008).For example, smoking households spent 46% less on education than non-smoking households in surveyed townships in rural China (Wang et al., 2006). Another study states, “Average male cigarette smokers [in Bangladesh] spend more than twice as much on cigarettes as per capita expenditure on clothing, housing, health and education combined” (Efroymson et al., 2001).Smoking decreases productivity (Tobacconomics, 2019) (Halpern et al., 2001). One study in the United States found that it cost 1,807 USD per year per smoker in lost productivity compared to non-smokers (Bunn III et al., 2006).Tobacco increases individual healthcare costs (Tobacconomics, 2019). A study in China found that individual medical spending attributable to smoking increased the poverty rate by 1.5% in urban areas and 0.7% in rural areas (Liu et al., 2006).Tobacco strains the healthcare sector and taxpayers foot the bill (Wunsch and Brodie, 2021) (Tobacconomics, 2019).The annual costs of tobacco from healthcare expenditures and losses in productivity are 1.8% of the world GDP, breaking down to 1.1% to 1.7% of LMICs’ GDPs (Goodchild et al., 2018) (Tobacconomics, 2019).One last fact: without intervention, tobacco is on track to kill a billion individuals during the 21st century (WHO, 2008) (Savedoff and Alwang, 2015) (Jha, 2012).The intervention The scientific literature on tobacco consumption is lengthy. The interventions that have the most significant effect on reducing tobacco consumption have been formalized in WHO’s MPOWER framework (Kaleta et [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RRm8vnmwjWK24ung2/taxing-tobacco-the-intervention-that-got-away-happy-world-no
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I wanted to share an exciting funding opportunity by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for projects that leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This funding opportunity aims to harness the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), including ChatGPT-4, to address challenges and generate evidence in various sectors.Applications for this funding opportunity opened just last week and will close on June 5, 2023. Given the short timeline, there is a high likelihood of limited competition, presenting an excellent chance for smaller, scrappier organizations to secure funding.Key Details:The foundation encourages proposals led by investigators based in LMICs.Projects should demonstrate clear applications of LLMs, engage relevant stakeholders, exhibit scalability potential, and emphasize responsible use and sustainability.Funding grants of up to $100,000 per project are available, with a total budget allocation of up to $3,000,000.The duration of each project will be three months, offering an opportunity to execute impactful initiatives efficiently.With the available funding, the foundation has the potential to support up to 30 projects!I think the incorporation of ChatGPT-4 is of particular significance since Microsoft invested $10 billion into ChatGPT.Thanks and Shameless Plug:I first heard about this funding opportunity thanks to Cameron King from Animal Advocacy Africa through the Impactful Animal Advocacy slack group, which you can join here. It's been a great platform for innovative/cross-discipline/international collaboration in all areas of animal advocacy and I highly recommend joining if this sounds appealing to you. Example Project Ideas (from ChatGPT4) to Kickstart Creative Thinking: AI-Driven Market Analysis: A significant AI grant could enable organizations coordinating cage-free egg campaigns to leverage advanced machine learning algorithms for market analysis. By analyzing vast amounts of data, including consumer preferences, purchasing patterns, and industry trends, AI could provide valuable insights into target demographics, identify potential barriers, and help develop effective messaging strategies to promote the adoption of cage-free eggs.LLM-Enhanced Supply Chain Optimization: With LLM-powered natural language understanding capabilities, organizations could leverage AI to analyze textual data from supply chain networks, including supplier contracts, transportation logistics, and inventory management systems. This AI-driven analysis would enable optimized decision-making, improved coordination, and more efficient supply chain management (say for cage-free eggs or malaria bednets), ensuring their availability and accessibility to interested parties.LLM-Assisted Policy Advocacy: With the power of LLMs, organizations can analyze vast amounts of legislative documents, policy reports, and public discourse related to certain subjects. By employing AI techniques like topic modeling and sentiment analysis, organizations could identify key policy influencers, track public sentiment, and develop evidence-based arguments to advocate for policies that promote human and animal well being.AI-Enhanced Financial Inclusion Solutions: Leverage LLM capabilities to develop AI-driven tools that facilitate financial access and empower underserved populations in LMICs to manage their finances effectively.AI-Enabled Data Analytics for Impact Evaluation: A significant AI grant could support the implementation of advanced data analytics tools and techniques by NGOs. They could leverage AI algorithms to analyze large datasets, including epidemiological data, to gain insights into the impact of their interventions. This would enable them to assess the [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/birs7oFGkCTkrD4x4/funding-opportunity-ai-in-lmics-100k-per-project-deadline
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Note: This is a submission for the 2023 Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews contest, due May 31, 2023. It addresses Question 1: “What is the probability that AGI is developed by January 1, 2043?”OverviewPeople tend to view harmful things as evil, and treat them as evil, to minimize their spread and impact. If enough people are hurt, betrayed, or outraged by AI applications, or lose their jobs, professional identity, and sense of purpose to AI, and/or become concerned about the existential risks of AI, then an intense public anti-AI backlash is likely to develop. That backlash could become a global, sustained, coordinated movement that morally stigmatizes AI researchers, AI companies, and AI funding sources. If that happens, then AGI is much less likely to develop by the year 2043. Negative public sentiment could be much more powerful in slowing AI than even the most draconian global regulations or formal moratorium, yet it is a neglected factor in most current AI timelines.IntroductionThe likelihood of AGI being developed by 2043 depends on two main factors: (1) how technically difficult it will be for AI researchers to make progress on AGI, and (2) how many resources – in terms of talent, funding, hardware, software, training data, etc. – are available for making that progress. Many experts’ ‘AI timelines’ for predicting AI development assume that AGI likelihood will be dominated by the first factor (technical difficulty), and assume that the second factor (available resources) will continue increasing.In this essay I disagree with that assumption. The resources allocated into AI research, development, and deployment may be much more vulnerable to public outrage and anti-AI hatred than the current AI hype cycle suggests. Specifically, I argue that ongoing AI developments are likely to provoke a moral backlash against AI that will choke off many of the key resources for making further AI progress. This public backlash could deploy the ancient psychology of moral stigmatization against our most advanced information technologies. The backlash is likely to be global, sustained, passionate, and well-organized. It may start with grass-roots concerns among a few expert ‘AI doomers’, and among journalists concerned about narrow AI risks, but it is likely to become better-organized over time as anti-AI activists join together to fight an emerging existential threat to our species. (Note that this question of anti-AI backlash likelihood is largely orthogonal to the issues of whether AGI is possible, and whether AI alignment is possible.)I’m not talking about a violent Butlerian Jihad. In the social media era, violence in the service of a social cause is almost always counter-productive, because it undermines the moral superiority and virtue-signaling strategies of righteous activists. (Indeed, a lot of ‘violence by activists’ turns out to be false flag operations funded by vested interests to discredit the activists that are fighting those vested interests.) Rather, I’m talking about a non-violent anti-AI movement at the social, cultural, political, and economic levels. For such a movement to slow down the development of AGI by 2043 (relative to the current expectations of [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/veR4W92bZsTsGgS3D/a-moral-backlash-against-ai-will-probably-slow-down-agi
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How should we expect AI to unfold over the coming decades? In this article, I explain and defend a compute-based framework for thinking about AI automation. This framework makes the following claims, which I defend throughout the article:The most salient impact of AI will be its ability to automate labor, which is likely to trigger a productivity explosion later this century, greatly altering the course of history.The availability of useful compute is the most important factor that determines progress in AI, a trend which will likely continue into the foreseeable future.AI performance is likely to become relatively predictable on most important, general measures of performance, at least when predicting over short time horizons. While none of these ideas are new, my goal is to provide a single article that articulates and defends the framework as a cohesive whole. In doing so, I present the perspective that Epoch researchers find most illuminating about the future of AI. Using this framework, I will justify a value of 40% for the probability of Transformative AI (TAI) arriving before 2043.SummaryThe post is structured as follows. In part one, I will argue that what matters most is when AI will be able to automate a wide variety of tasks in the economy. The importance of this milestone is substantiated by simple models of the economy that predict AI could greatly accelerate the world economic growth rate, dramatically changing our world. In part two, I will argue that availability of data is less important than compute for explaining progress in AI, and that compute may even play an important role driving algorithmic progress. In part three, I will argue against a commonly held view that AI progress is inherently unpredictable, providing reasons to think that AI capabilities may be anticipated in advance. Finally, in part four, I will conclude by using the framework to build a probability distribution over the date of arrival for transformative AI.[1]Part 1: Widespread automation from AIWhen discussing AI timelines, it is often taken for granted that the relevant milestone is the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or a software system that can do or learn “everything that a human can do.” However, this definition is vague. For instance, it's unclear whether the system needs to surpass all humans, some upper decile, or the median human.Perhaps more importantly, it’s not immediately obvious why we should care about the arrival of a single software system with certain properties. Plausibly, a set of narrow software programs could drastically change the world before the arrival of any monolithic AGI system (Drexler, 2019). In general, it seems more useful to characterize AI timelines in terms of the impacts AI will have on the world. But, that still leaves open the question of what impacts we should expect AI to have and how we can measure those impacts.As a starting point, it seems that automating labor is likely to be the driving force behind developing AI, providing huge and direct financial incentives for AI companies to develop the technology. The productivity [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fsaogRokXxby6LFd7/a-compute-based-framework-for-thinking-about-the-future-of
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Stephen Walsh PhD recently carried out a review of different surveys estimating the number of vegans in the UK on behalf of the UK Vegan Society. This is the best review I’ve seen in the UK context that takes into account recent data.The review suggests:Around 0.25% of UK adults were vegan in 2015. The proportion was probably stable around this level for at least 15 years.The share increased to around 1% by 2018.A best guess of a further increase to around 1.35% by 2022 (note this estimate is less certain and not directly comparable to earlier estimates).The headline results are based on the Food and You (face-to-face) and Food and You 2 (online, postal) surveys commissioned by the UK Food Standards Agency, after comparison with results from other surveys, including consideration of questions asked to identify vegans, survey mode, sampling method and sample size.Stephen’s article was originally published in the Vegan Society Magazine (only available to members). Given the potential wider interest in the results, I have received his permission to share a link to a copy of his article, and he is happy to answer any interesting questions that come through in the comments. I have copied below the chart summarising the results of different surveys offering a consistent time trend, and the questions used in the Food and You Survey (2010 to 2018). The article contains links with further information about the surveys used in the chart below.Questions used in the Food and You Survey (2010 to 2018)Question 2_7Which, if any, of the following applies to you? Please state all that apply. Completely vegetarian Partly vegetarian Vegan Avoid certain food for religious or cultural reasons None (SINGLE CODE ONLY)IF Q2_7 = Vegan VeganChk Can I just check, do you eat any foods of animal origin. That is meat, fish, poultry, milk, milk products, eggs or any dishes that contain these? 1 Yes 2 No Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HuLCFBEbekZ6AE7LP/linkpost-survey-evidence-on-the-number-of-vegans-in-the-uk
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Introduction:I’ve written quite a few articles casting doubt on several aspects of the AI doom narrative. (I’ve starting archiving them on my substack for easier sharing). This article is my first attempt to link them together to form a connected argument for why I find imminent AI doom unlikely.I don’t expect every one of the ideas presented here to be correct. I have a PHD and work as a computational physicist, so I’m fairly confident about aspects related to that, but I do not wish to be treated as an expert on other subjects such as machine learning where I am familiar with the subject, but not an expert. You should never expect one person to cover a huge range of topics across multiple different domains, without making the occasional mistake. I have done my best with the knowledge I have available. I don’t speculate about specific timelines here. I suspect that AGI is decades away at minimum, and I may reassess my beliefs as time goes on and technology changes. In part 1, I will point out the parallel frameworks of values and capabilities. I show what happens when we entertain the possibility that at least some AGI could be fallible and beatable. In part 2, I outline some of my many arguments that most AGI will be both fallible and beatable, and not capable of world domination.In part 3, I outline a few arguments against the ideas that “x-risk” safe AGI is super difficult, taking particular aim at the “absolute fanatical maximiser” assumption of early AI writing. In part 4, I speculate on how the above assumptions could lead to a safe navigation of AI development in the future. This article does not speculate on AI timelines, or on the reasons why AI doom estimates are so high around here. I have my suspicions on both questions. On the first, I think AGI is many decades away, on the second, I think founder effects are primarily to blame. However these will not be the focus of this article. Part 1: The bullseye frameworkWhen arguing for AI doom, a typical argument will involve the possibility space of AGI. Invoking the orthogonality thesis and instrumental convergence, the argument goes that in the possibility space of AGI, there are far more machines that want to kill us than those that don’t. The argument is that the fraction is so small that AGI will be rogue by default: like the picture below. As a sceptic, I do not find this, on its own, to be convincing. My rejoinder would be that AGI’s are not being plucked randomly from possibility space. They are being deliberately constructed and evolved specifically to meet that small target. An AI that has the values of “scream profanities at everyone” is not going to survive long in development. Therefore, even if AI development starts in dangerous territory, it will end up in safe territory, following path A. (I will flesh this argument out more in part 3 of this article). To which the doomer will [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Nxtq2d8Xb3QuuHKE8/the-bullseye-framework-my-case-against-ai-doom
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Today, the AI Extinction Statement was released by the Center for AI Safety, a one-sentence statement jointly signed by a historic coalition of AI experts, professors, and tech leaders.Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio have signed, as have the CEOs of the major AGI labs–Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei–as well as executives from Microsoft and Google (but notably not Meta).The statement reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”We hope this statement will bring AI x-risk further into the overton window and open up discussion around AI’s most severe risks. Given the growing number of experts and public figures who take risks from advanced AI seriously, we hope to improve epistemics by encouraging discussion and focusing public and international attention toward this issue. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Yk4D4DZpx6eriMDyY/statement-on-ai-extinction-signed-by-agi-labs-top-academics
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This non-exhaustive List was inspired and based on Konstantins personal research into Masters programmes. We expanded it with the help of others across the community. It was created for the 2023 cohort of fellows of the EU Tech Policy Fellowship hosted by Training for Good and includes a list of Masters in Europe, the UK and the US. CLICK HERE for the list. Limitations and Epistemic Status The list is based on personal experience, research, and limited feedback from others in the community. It is curated from a European perspective. Thus, the numbers and deadlines take European/EEA citizens as a reference point. Furthermore, whilst Masters from Europe, the UK and the US are listed, we have focussed on researching Masters in Europe. The latter lists are currently very incomplete. It's important to emphasise that this list is not exhaustive and may not represent all options of Masters in this Field. Additionally, the quality and relevance of each program may vary depending on individual needs, goals, and interests.Therefore, we recommended that individuals interested in pursuing a career in tech policy or policy in general conduct their own research, explore various programs, and consider multiple sources of information before making a decision! Ultimately, the decision to pursue a particular graduate program should be based on a thorough evaluation of individual goals, resources, and circumstances.What this post is not This post does not outline what to study and what to aim for in choosing your Masters Degree. It is supposed to help people who have already decided that they want to pursue a Masters in Tech Policy, Security Studies or Public Policy but does not mean to imply that these are your only or even best options if you want to enter the Tech Policy field. A possibly safer and more classical approach of entering EU policy is to study basic law and economics subjects as they still hold a high standing across departments and fields in policy (See this article on “Joining the EU bubble”). This would also give you more flexible career capital than tech policy degrees. To elaborate on these different paths a detailed post (such this one) outlining what to aim for in your studies if you want to contribute to tech policy, would be incredibly valuable and we encourage you to write this up and share your perspective if you have spent some time thinking about this! Created for who?This list is aimed at people interested in working in public policy (especially in Europe) and in tech policy with a potential to specialise in AI but only provides a very narrow selection of options. Degrees with "tech" or "AI'' related words in the name are helpful to quickly signal your relevance on these topics. Many of the Masters in this list are geared towards people with a non-technical undergraduate degree in social sciences, economics etc. Thus, it excludes many Masters on Artificial Intelligence and Tech Policy that require you to have had a Computer Sciences or technical background. We wanted to share the list to help with some of [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8CD4i8FsRApcbt3an/list-of-masters-programs-in-tech-policy-public-policy-and
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- Tl;drMany reports indicate that indoor air quality (IAQ) interventions are likely to be effective at reducing respiratory disease transmission. However, to date there’s been very little focus on the workforce that will implement these interventions. I suggest that the US Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and building maintenance workforces have already posed a significant obstacle to these interventions, and broad uptake of IAQ measures will be significantly hindered by them in the future. The impact will vary in predictable ways depending on the nature of the intervention and its implementation. We should favor simple techniques with improved oversight and outsource or crosscheck technically complex work to people outside of the current HVAC workforce. We should also make IAQ conditions and devices as transparent as possible to both experts and building occupants.To skip my bio and the technical horrors section, proceed to the recommendations in section 4.2. Who am I? Why do I think This? How Certain am I? I began working in construction in 1991. I did a formal carpentry apprenticeship in Victoria BC in the mid-90s and moved to the US in ‘99. Around 2008 I started taking greater interest in HVAC because - despite paying top dollar to local subcontractors - our projects had persistent HVAC problems. Despite protestations that they were following exemplary practices, our projects were plagued with high humidity, loud noise, frequent mechanical failure, and room-to-room temperature differences. This led me to first learn all aspects of system design and controls, and culminated in full system installations. Along the way I obtained a NJ Master HVAC license, performed the thermal work of ~2k light-duty energy retrofits, obtained multiple certifications in HVAC and low-energy design, and became a regional expert in building diagnostics. Since 2010 I’ve worked as a contractor or consultant to roughly a dozen major HVAC contractors and hundreds of homeowners.I’m reasonably certain that the baseline competence of the HVAC workforce is insufficient to broadly and reliably deploy IAQ interventions and that this is a serious obstacle. My comments are specific to the US. I’ve discussed these problems extensively with friends and acquaintances working at a national level and in other parts of the US and believe them to be common to most of the country. The problems are specific to the light commercial and residential workforce, but not domains that are closely monitored by mechanical engineering teams (e.g. hospitals). Based on some limited experience I suspect these problems are also common to Canada, but I’m less certain about their severity.3. Technical Horrors: Why is This so Difficult?Within HVAC, many important jobs are currently either not performed or delegated to people who are largely incapable of performing them. Many people convincingly lie about their capacity to perform a job they’re incapable of, report having done things they haven’t, or even make statements at odds with physics.Examples include:Accurate heat load/loss calculations: These are used to size heating and cooling systems, and in most areas are code mandated for both new and replacement systems. Competent sizing (Manual J [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/q7dJz9ZaZGTSZL8Jk/obstacles-to-the-implementation-of-indoor-air-quality
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Part of my work for Arb Research (https://arbresearch.com/). Epistemic Status: I have no scientific background and wrote this after only a couple of days thought, so it is very possible that there is some argument I am unaware of, but which would be obvious to physicists, why a ‘resource-gathering without settlement’ approach to interstellar exploration is not feasible. However, my Arb colleague Vasco Grilo has aerospace engineering expertise, and says he can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t be feasible in principle. Still, take all this with a large dose of caution. Some futurists have considered it likely that, at least absent existential catastrophe in the next few centuries, human beings (or our post-human or machine descendants) will eventually attempt to settle our galaxy. After all, there are vastly more resources in the rest of the Milky Way than in the Solar system. So we could support far more lives and create much more of anything else we care about, if we make use of stuff out there in the wider galaxy. And one very obvious way for us to make use of that stuff is for us to send out spaceships to establish settlements which make use of the energy of the stars they arrive at. Those settlements could in turn seed further settlements in an iterative process. (This would likely require “digital people” https://www.cold-takes.com/digital-people-faq/#fnref6 given the distances involved in interstellar travel.) However, this is not the only way in which we could try to make use of resources outside the solar system. Another way to do so would be to try and gather resources and bring them back to the Solar system without establishing any permanent settlements of either humans or AIs outside the Solar system itself. I think that a government on Earth (or elsewhere in the solar system) might actually prefer gathering resources in this way to space settlements for the following reason:Impossibility of Interstellar Governance (IIG): Because of the huge distances between stars, it is simply not possible for a government in the Solar system to exercise long-term effective governance over any space colonies further away than (at most) the closest handful of stars. For a powerful, although not completely conclusive, case for this claim see this Medium post: https://medium.com/@KevinKohlerFM/cosmic-anarchy-and-its-consequences-b1a557b1a2e3Given IIG, no government within the Solar system can be the government of a settlement outside it. Therefore, if a government sets up a colony run by agents in another star system, it loses direct control of those resources. Of course, the government can try and exercise more indirect control over what happens by choosing starting colonists with particular values. But it’s unclear the degree of control that will allow for long-term. Meanwhile, a government could try and send a mission to other stars which:A) Is not capable of setting-up a new self-sufficient settlement, or can be trusted not to do so. BUT,B) is capable of setting up physical infrastructure to extract the system’s energy and resources and bringing them back to the Solar system. [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5hegHvhrBZaBTWwxs/governments-might-prefer-bringing-resources-back-to-the
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Summary of key points:To streamline cage-free commitments in Africa as part of effective animal advocacy in the world.Create a producer’s directory for sourcing in AfricaTrain farmers in higher farm welfare practicesResearch centre to inform stakeholders on policy regarding farm animal welfareAfrica’s egg production is predominantly from caged farming, with only 40% of eggs being cage-free in 2020, according to FAOSTAT. About 80% of commercial hens are kept in cages in Northern and South Africa, with the caged numbers also rising in other African countries. With a rising population and a growing middle class, Africa’s egg market is expected to grow annually by 11.26%, 3.5% more than the global egg market growth within 2023-2027. Africa has about 550 million layer hens, with a commercial supply of two-thirds of egg consumption. The region's exponential growth in the poultry industry is expected to continue due to the rising middle class and rapid urbanisation. Many global and multinational corporations are responding to this by rapidly expanding their operations to and within Africa. “Walmart to open more stores in Africa via Massmart..” and “KFC to expand in Africa but it lacks only one thing: Chickens” by the Financial Times in 2015 and 2016 respectively. “Famous brands continue expansion in Africa” by CNBC Africa, 2015. Cage-free commitments are relatively low in Africa compared to other regions. One of the most cited reasons by multinational and local companies is the lack of sustainable cage-free products in my outreach to global companies present in Africa. At present, the Open Wing Alliance has a cage-free producers directory for all the regions in the world except Africa. A model farm is of immense importance as it will provide practical training in best practices in cage-free management, serve as a reference farm for cage-free producers to visit, and serve farmers, auditors, veterinarians and other industry stakeholders across Africa. Consolidating and training egg producers in high-welfare production will alleviate the needless sufferings thousands of millions of chickens will face in Africa. The model farm will thus serve as Africa's research and development centre, informing policy formulation and legislation. As part of its goals, the farm will develop and consolidate a cage-free producer’s directory in Africa, which is currently a bottleneck to cage-free commitments in the region with international and local companies to streamline cage-free policies to improve animal welfare. Corporate cage-free commitments will not be sustainable in Africa without a reliable egg producers directory. Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SmKLaLPsogwtFs6WT/why-africa-needs-a-cage-free-model-farm-and-producer-s
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BackgroundThis report is about January to December 2022 in EA Estonia, corresponding to our last grant period (funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund for 1 FTE and group expenses).Quick facts about Estonia: it has a population of 1.3 million and is placed both geographically and culturally between the Nordics and Eastern Europe. Our language has 14 noun cases, it is the birthplace of 10 unicorns, and we have the best mushroom scientists. Go figure.In our national EA group, there are 23–30 people whom I would consider to be “highly engaged” (meaning they have spent more than 100 hours engaging with EA content, have developed career plans and have taken significant steps in pursuit of doing good). You could expect around 30 people to attend our largest community event (Figure 1) and our Slack channel has 50–60 active weekly members (Figure 2).Figure 1: Attendees of our largest community event, the EA Estonia Summer Retreat. August 2022.Figure 2. EA Estonia Slack statistics from its creation. Weekly active members have been oscillating between 40 and 65 throughout 2022. https://ibb.co/rHhxmfLGroup strategyHere are the main metrics we used to evaluate our impact:Awareness: Number of people aware of the term “effective altruism” and EA Estonia.Activities:Introductory talksDirect outreachSocial media outreachFirst engagement: Number of people who took action because of our outreach.Activities:Introductory courseCause-specific reading groupsCareer planning: Number of people that develop career plans based on EA principles that are well informed and well reasoned.Activities:Career courseTaking action: Number of people taking significant action based on EA-informed career plans (e.g. starting full-time jobs, university degrees).Activities:1-1 career callsPeer-mentoringDirectly sharing opportunitiesConcerns with this model:The actual impact comes when people take action within high-impact jobs, which we currently don't measure.We don't measure value drift or other kinds of decreased engagement after taking significant next steps.This model doesn't prioritize targeting existing Highly Engaged EAs (HEAs) to have a higher impact.This also doesn't include a more meta-level goal of keeping people engaged and interested while moving towards an HEA status. We do organize social events for this reason, however the impact of them is not quantified.Regarless of these concerns, the main theory of change feels relatively straight-forward: (1) we find young altruistically-minded people who are unclear about their future career plans, then (2) we make them aware of the effective altruism movement and various high-impact career paths, and then (3) we prompt them to develop explicit career plans and encourage them to take action upon them.Below I will go into more detail regarding the goals, activities and results of 2022 in two categories: (i) outreach and (ii) growing HEAs. I will end with a short conclusion and key takeaways for next year.I OutreachGoal: 5,000 new people who know what “effective altruism” means and that there is an active local group in Estonia. Actual: 20,776 people reached.Activities:Liina Salonen started working full-time as the Communictions Specialist in EA Estonia. Reached at least 20,000 people on Facebook with the Introductory Course social media campaign Student fair tabling. At least 155 people reached (played the Giving Game)Goal: 10 lecturers mentioning EA EstoniaActual: 1 lecturers reachedVisited a philosophy lecture. [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E3wSsdTXLGZ3pvYSY/ea-estonia-s-impact-in-2022
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It's really hard to do community building well. Opinions on strategy and vision vary a lot, and we don't yet know enough about what actually works and how well. Here, I'll suggest one axis of community-building strategy which helped me clarify and compare some contrasting opinions.[1] Will Macaskill's proposed Definition of Effective Altruism is composed of[2]:An overarching effort to figure out what are the best opportunities to do good. A community of people that work to bring more resources to these opportunities, or work on these directly.This suggests a "cause-first" community-building strategy, where the main goal for community builders is to get more manpower into the top cause areas. Communities are measured by the total impact produced directly through the people they engage with. Communities try to find the most promising people, persuade them to work on top causes, and empower them to do so well. CEA's definition and strategy seem to be mostly along these lines:Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.and Our mission is to nurture a community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.Member-firstLet's try out a different definition for the EA community, taken from CEA's guiding principles[3]:The effective altruism community is a global community of people who care deeply about the world, make helping others a significant part of their lives, and use evidence and reason to figure out how best to do so.This, to me, suggests a subtly different vision and strategy for the community. One that is, first of all, focused on these people who live by EA principles. Such a "member-first" strategy could have a supporting infrastructure that is focused on helping the individuals involved to live their lives according to these principles, and an outreach/growth ecosystem that works to make the principles of EA more universal[4][5].What's the difference?I think this dimension has important effects on the value of the community, and that both local and global community-building strategies should be aware of the tradeoffs between the two. I'll list some examples and caricatures for the distinction between the two, to give a more intuitive grasp of how these strategies differ, without any clear order: Leaning cause-firstLeaning member-firstKeep EA Small and WeirdBig Tent EACurrent EA Handbook (focus on introducing major causes)2015's EA Handbook (focus on core EA principles)80,000 HoursProbably GoodWants more people doing high-quality AI Safety work, regardless of their acceptance of EA principlesWants more people deeply understanding and accepting EA principles, regardless of what they actually work on or donate to.Targeted outreach to students in high ranking universitiesBroad outreach with diverse messagingEncourages people to change occupations to focus on the world's most pressing problemsEncourages people to use the tools and principles of EA to do more good in their current trajectoryRisk of [...] Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2TdXocyDF9PxWewwY/should-the-ea-community-be-cause-first-or-member-first
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Charity Entrepreneurship is frequently contacted by individuals and donors who like our model. Several have expressed interest in seeing the model expanded, or seeing what a twist on the model would look like (e.g., different cause area, region, etc.) Although we are excited about maximizing CE’s impact, we are less convinced by the idea of growing the effective charity pool via franchising or other independent nonprofit incubators. This is because new incubators often do not address the actual bottlenecks faced by the nonprofit landscape, as we see them. There are lots of factors that prevent great new charities from being launched, and from eventually having a large impact. We have scaled CE to about 10 charities a year, and from our perspective, these are the three major bottlenecks to growing the new charity ecosystem further: Mid-stage funding, Founders and Multiplying effects.
Source:
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
We've just passed the half-year mark for this project! If you're reading this, please consider taking this 5 minute survey — all questions optional. If you listen to the podcast version, we have a separate survey for that here. Thanks to everyone that has responded to this already!
Original text:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9QcmyGAjERHRFfrr7/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-1st-to-7th-may-2023
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
How worried about AI risk will we feel in the future, when we can see advanced machine intelligence up close? We should worry accordingly now.
Original article:
https://joecarlsmith.com/2023/05/08/predictable-updating-about-ai-risk
Narrated by Joe Carlsmith and included on the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
We've just passed the half-year mark for this project! If you're reading this, please consider taking this 5 minute survey — all questions optional. If you listen to the podcast version, we have a separate survey for that here. Thanks to everyone that has responded to this already!
Original text:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wzn7hEj3BSz7us7ge/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-24th-30th-april-2023
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
People often ask me for career advice related to AGI safety. This post summarizes the advice I most commonly give. I’ve split it into three sections: general mindset, alignment research and governance work. For each of the latter two, I start with high-level advice aimed primarily at students and those early in their careers, then dig into more details of the field. See also this post I wrote two years ago, containing a bunch of fairly general career advice. ## General mindset In order to have a big impact on the world you need to find a big lever. This document assumes that you think, as I do, that AGI safety is the biggest such lever. There are many ways to pull on that lever, though—from research and engineering to operations and field-building to politics and communications. I encourage you to choose between these based primarily on your personal fit—a combination of what you're really good at and what you really enjoy. In my opinion the difference between being a great versus a mediocre fit swamps other differences in the impactfulness of most pairs of AGI-safety-related jobs.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xg7gxsYaMa6F3uH8h/agi-safety-career-advice
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Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/m2Y6HheC2Q2GLQ3oS/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-17th-23rd-april-2023
This podcast has just passed the 6-month mark! Please give us your feedback and suggestions so we can continue to improve — the survey should take no more than 10 minutes, and we really appreciate your input!
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
The excellent report from Rethink Priorities was my main source for this. Many of the substantial points I make are taken from it, though errors are my own. It’s worth reading! The authors are Gavriel Kleinwaks, Alastair Fraser-Urquhart, Jam Kraprayoon, and Josh Morrison.
Clean water
In the mid 19th century, London had a sewage problem. It relied on a patchwork of a few hundred sewers, of brick and wood, and hundreds of thousands of cesspits. The Thames — Londoners’ main source of drinking water — was near-opaque with waste. Here is Michael Faraday in an 1855 letter to The Times:
"Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface even in water of this kind […] The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water. It was the same as that which now comes up from the gully holes in the streets. The whole river was for the time a real sewer […] If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness."
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WLok4YuJ4kfFpDRTi/first-clean-water-now-clean-air
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a linkpost for a new 80,000 hours episode focused on how to engage in climate from an effective altruist perspective.
- The podcast lives here, including a selection of highlights as well as a full transcript and lots of additional links. Thanks to 80,000hours’ new feature rolled out on April 1st you can even listen to it!
- My Twitter thread is here.
Rob and I are having a pretty wide-ranging conversation, here are the things we cover which I find most interesting for different audiences:
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A3ZLLanDZZt9sgGQ9/new-80-000-hours-podcast-on-high-impact-climate-philanthropy
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o3Gaoizs2So6SpgLH/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-27th-march-to-16th-april
This podcast has just passed the 6-month mark! Please give us your feedback and suggestions so we can continue to improve — the survey should take no more than 10 minutes, and we really appreciate your input!
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
I recently spent some time reflecting on my career and my life, for a few reasons:
- It was my 29th birthday, an occasion which felt like a particularly natural time to think through what I wanted to accomplish over the course of the next year 🙂.
- It seems like AI progress is heating up.
- It felt like a good time to reflect on how Redwood has been going, because we’ve been having conversations with funders about getting more funding.
I wanted to have a better answer to these questions:
- What’s the default trajectory that I should plan for my career to follow? And what does this imply for what I should be doing right now?
- How much urgency should I feel in my life?
- How hard should I work?
- How much should I be trying to do the most valuable-seeming thing, vs engaging in more playful exploration and learning?
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2DzLY6YP2z5zRDAGA/a-freshman-year-during-the-ai-midgame-my-approach-to-the
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This is a linkpost for https://www.forourposterity.com/want-to-win-the-agi-race-solve-alignment/
Society really cares about safety. Practically speaking, the binding constraint on deploying your AGI could well be your ability to align your AGI. Solving (scalable) alignment might be worth lots of $$$ and key to beating China.
Look, I really don't want Xi Jinping Thought to rule the world. If China gets AGI first, the ensuing rapid AI-powered scientific and technological progress could well give it a decisive advantage (cf potential for >30%/year economic growth with AGI). I think there's a very real specter of global authoritarianism here.
Or hey, maybe you just think AGI is cool. You want to go build amazing products and enable breakthrough science and solve the world’s problems.
So, race to AGI with reckless abandon then? At this point, people get into agonizing discussions about safety tradeoffs. And many people just mood affiliate their way to an answer: "accelerate, progress go brrrr," or "AI scary, slow it down."
I see this much more practically. And, practically, society cares about safety, a lot. Do you actually think that you’ll be able to and allowed to deploy an AI system that has, say, a 10% chance of destroying all of humanity?
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ackzs8Wbk7isDzs2n/want-to-win-the-agi-race-solve-alignment
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Far fewer people are working on it than you might think, and even the alignment research that is happening is very much not on track. (But it’s a solvable problem, if we get our act together.)
Original article:
This is a linkpost for https://www.forourposterity.com/nobodys-on-the-ball-on-agi-alignment/
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5LNxeWFdoynvgZeik/nobody-s-on-the-ball-on-agi-alignment
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In my last essay, I looked at two stories (brute preference for systematic-ness, and money-pumps) about why ethical anti-realists should still be interested in ethics – two stories about why the “philosophy game” is worth playing, even if there are no objective normative truths, and you’re free to do whatever you want. I think some versions of these stories might well have a role to play; but I find that on their own, they don’t fully capture what feels alive to me about ethics. Here I try to say something that gets closer.
Original article:
https://joecarlsmith.com/2023/02/17/seeing-more-whole
Narrated by Joe Carlsmith and included on the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/idpbfmPjHFCvzj46L/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-13th-19th-march-2023
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. In this paper, we show that the case for preventing catastrophe does not depend on longtermism. Standard cost-benefit analysis implies that governments should spend much more on reducing catastrophic risk. We argue that a government catastrophe policy guided by cost-benefit analysis should be the goal of longtermists in the political sphere. This policy would be democratically acceptable, and it would reduce existential risk by almost as much as a strong longtermist policy.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DiGL5FuLgWActPBsf/how-much-should-governments-pay-to-prevent-catastrophes
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Oral rehydration therapy is now the standard treatment for dehydration. It’s saved millions of lives, and can be prepared at home in minutes. So why did it take so long to discover?
Written by Matt Reynolds for Asterisk Magazine.
Original article:
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/2/salt-sugar-water-zinc-how-scientists-learned-to-treat-the-20th-century-s-biggest-killer-of-children
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fWGdsWbS6vtC9E7ii/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-6th-12th-march-2023
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yCxsz9jk5iau2uvYH/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-27th-feb-5th-mar-2023
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
This document looks at the predictions made by AI experts in The 2016 Expert Survey on Progress in AI, analyses the predictions on ‘Narrow tasks’, and gives a Brier score to the median of the experts’ predictions.
My analysis suggests that the experts did a fairly good job of forecasting (Brier score = 0.21), and would have been less accurate if they had predicted each development in AI to generally come, by a factor of 1.5, later (Brier score = 0.26) or sooner (Brier score = 0.29) than they actually predicted.
Original article:
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
I don’t think the existing evidence justifies HLI's estimate of 50% household spillovers.
My main disagreements are:
- Two of the three RCTs HLI relies on to estimate spillovers are on interventions specifically intended to benefit household members (unlike StrongMinds’ program, which targets women and adolescents living with depression).
- Those RCTs only measure the wellbeing of a subset of household members most likely to benefit from the intervention.
- The results of the third RCT are inconsistent with HLI’s estimate.
Original article:
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bEJ6SyrkSF45B2LWZ/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-20th-26th-feb-2023
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
Ethical philosophy often tries to systematize. That is, it seeks general principles that will explain, unify, and revise our more particular intuitions. And sometimes, this can lead to strange and uncomfortable places.
Original article:
https://joecarlsmith.com/2023/02/16/why-should-ethical-anti-realists-do-ethics
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fAWotZTEnyycJnuxz/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-6th-19th-feb-2023
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
Apply now to start a nonprofit in Biosecurity or Large-Scale Global Health
In this post we introduce our top five charity ideas for launch in 2023, in the areas of Biosecurity and Large-Scale Global Health. These are the result of five months’ work from our research team, and a six-stage iterative process that includes collaboration with partners and ideas from within and outside of the EA community.
We’re looking for people to launch these ideas through our July - August 2023 Incubation Program. The deadline for applications is March 12, 2023.
We provide cost-covered two-month training, stipends, ongoing mentorship, and grants up to $200,000 per project. You can learn more on our website. We also invite you to join our event on February 20, 6PM UK Time. Sam Hilton, our Director of Research, will introduce the ideas and answer your questions. Sign up here.
Original article:
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Hi everyone,
I've been reading up on H5N1 this weekend, and I'm pretty concerned. Right now my hunch is that there is a non-zero chance that it will cost more than 10,000 people their lives.
To be clear, I think it is unlikely that H5N1 will become a pandemic anywhere close to the size of covid.
Nevertheless, I think our community should be actively following the news and start thinking about ways to be helpful if the probability increases. I am creating this thread as a place where people can discuss and share information about H5N1. We have a lot of pandemic experts in this community, do chime in!
Original article:
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a linkpost for https://epochai.org/blog/literature-review-of-transformative-artificial-intelligence-timelines
We summarize and compare several models and forecasts predicting when transformative AI will be developed.
Highlights
- The review includes quantitative models, including both outside and inside view, and judgment-based forecasts by (teams of) experts.
- While we do not necessarily endorse their conclusions, the inside-view model the Epoch team found most compelling is Ajeya Cotra’s “Forecasting TAI with biological anchors”, the best-rated outside-view model was Tom Davidson’s “Semi-informative priors over AI timelines”, and the best-rated judgment-based forecast was Samotsvety’s AGI Timelines Forecast.
- The inside-view models we reviewed predicted shorter timelines (e.g. bioanchors has a median of 2052) while the outside-view models predicted longer timelines (e.g. semi-informative priors has a median over 2100). The judgment-based forecasts are skewed towards agreement with the inside-view models, and are often more aggressive (e.g. Samotsvety assigned a median of 2043).
Original article:
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Qzfew7EBPgdCzsxED/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-30th-jan-5th-feb-2023
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
This post outlines the capability approach to thinking about human welfare. I think that this approach, while very popular in international development, is neglected in EA. While the capability approach has problems, I think that it provides a better approach to thinking about improving human welfare than approaches based on measuring happiness or subjective wellbeing (SWB) or approaches based on preference satisfaction. Finally, even if you disagree that the capability approach is best, I think this post will be useful to you because it may clarify why many people and organizations in the international development or global health space take the positions that they do. I will be drawing heavily on the work of Amartya Sen, but I will often not be citing specific texts because I’m an academic and getting to write without careful citations is thrilling.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zy6jGPeFKHaoxKEfT/the-capability-approach
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hzc26vGa4RLns7TvK/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-23rd-29th-jan-23
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6Ezg8HgHib9bpWCFr/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-16th-22nd-jan-23
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
- We offer welfare range estimates for 11 farmed species: pigs, chickens, carp, salmon, octopuses, shrimp, crayfish, crabs, bees, black soldier flies, and silkworms.
- These estimates are, essentially, estimates of the differences in the possible intensities of these animals' pleasures and pains relative to humans' pleasures and pains. Then, we add a number of controversial (albeit plausible) philosophical assumptions (including hedonism, valence symmetry, and others discussed here) to reach conclusions about animals' welfare ranges relative to human's welfare range.
- Given hedonism and conditional on sentience, we think (credence: 0.7) that none of the vertebrate nonhuman animals of interest have a welfare range that’s more than double the size of any of the others. While carp and salmon have lower scores than pigs and chickens, we suspect that’s largely due to a lack of research.
- Given hedonism and conditional on sentience, we think (credence: 0.65) that the welfare ranges of humans and the vertebrate animals of interest are within an order of magnitude of one another.
- Given hedonism and conditional on sentience, we think (credence 0.6) that all the invertebrates of interest have welfare ranges within two orders of magnitude of the vertebrate nonhuman animals of interest. Invertebrates are so diverse and we know so little about them; hence, our caution.
- Our view is that the estimates we’ve provided should be seen as placeholders—albeit, we submit, the best such placeholders available. We’re providing a starting point for more rigorous, empirically-driven research into animals’ welfare ranges. At the same time, we’re offering guidance for decisions that have to be made long before that research is finished
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Qk3hd6PrFManj8K6o/rethink-priorities-welfare-range-estimates
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
For many years, I've actively lived in avoidance of idolizing behavior and in pursuit of a nuanced view of even those I respect most deeply. I think this has helped me in numerous ways and has been of particular help in weathering the past few months within the EA community. Below, I discuss how I think about the act of idolizing behavior, some of my personal experiences, and how this mentality can be of use to others.
Note: I want more people to post on the EA Forum and have their ideas taken seriously regardless of whether they conform to Forum stylistic norms. I'm perfectly capable of writing a version of this post in the style typical to the Forum, but this post is written the way I actually like to write. If this style doesn’t work for you, you might want to read the first section “Anarchists have no idols” and then skip ahead to the section “Living without idols, Pt. 1” toward the end. You’ll lose some of the insights contained in my anecdotes, but still get most of the core ideas I want to convey here.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jgspXC8GKA7RtxMRE/on-living-without-idols
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DNWpFLrtrJXe4mted/ea-and-lw-forum-summaries-9th-jan-to-15th-jan-23
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
I previously wrote an entry for the Open Philanthropy Cause Exploration Prize on why preventing violence against women and girls is a global priority. For an introduction to the area, I have written a brief summary below. In this post, I will extend that work, diving deeper into the literature and the landscape of organisations in the field, as well as creating a cost-effectiveness model for some of the most promising preventative interventions. Based on this, I will offer some concrete recommendations that different stakeholders should take - from individuals looking to donate, to funders, to charity evaluators and incubators.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uH9akQzJkzpBD5Duw/what-you-can-do-to-help-stop-violence-against-women-and
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
In this post, we point out that short AI timelines would cause real interest rates to be high, and would do so under expectations of either unaligned or aligned AI. However, 30- to 50-year real interest rates are low. We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities:
- Long(er) timelines. Financial markets are often highly effective information aggregators (the “efficient market hypothesis”), and therefore real interest rates accurately reflect that transformative AI is unlikely to be developed in the next 30-50 years.
- Market inefficiency. Markets are radically underestimating how soon advanced AI technology will be developed, and real interest rates are therefore too low. There is thus an opportunity for philanthropists to borrow while real rates are low to cheaply do good today; and/or an opportunity for anyone to earn excess returns by betting that real rates will rise.
In the rest of this post we flesh out this argument.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8c7LycgtkypkgYjZx/agi-and-the-emh-markets-are-not-expecting-aligned-or
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JZuCg7TtfzzaX9bBY/ea-and-lw-forum-summaries-holiday-edition-19th-dec-8th-jan
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
At Anima International, we recently decided to suspend our campaign against live fish sales in Poland indefinitely. After a few years of running the campaign, we are now concerned about the effects of our efforts, specifically the possibility of a net negative result for the lives of animals. We believe that by writing about it openly we can help foster a culture of intellectual honesty, information sharing and accountability. Ideally, our case can serve as a good example on reflecting on potential unintended consequences of advocacy interventions.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/snnfmepzrwpAsAoDT/why-anima-international-suspended-the-campaign-to-end-live
This is a linkpost for https://animainternational.org/blog/why-anima-international-suspended-the-campaign-to-end-live-fish-sales-in-poland
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a linkpost for https://simonm.substack.com/p/strongminds-should-not-be-a-top-rated
GWWC lists StrongMinds as a “top-rated” charity. Their reason for doing so is because Founders Pledge has determined they are cost-effective in their report into mental health.
I could say here, “and that report was written in 2019 - either they should update the report or remove the top rating” and we could all go home. In fact, most of what I’m about to say does consist of “the data really isn’t that clear yet”.
I think the strongest statement I can make (which I doubt StrongMinds would disagree with) is:
“StrongMinds have made limited effort to be quantitative in their self-evaluation, haven’t continued monitoring impact after intervention, haven’t done the research they once claimed they would. They have not been vetted sufficiently to be considered a top charity, and only one independent group has done the work to look into them.”
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ffmbLCzJctLac3rDu/strongminds-should-not-be-a-top-rated-charity-yet
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
If you fear that someone will build a machine that will seize control of the world and annihilate humanity, then one kind of response is to try to build further machines that will seize control of the world even earlier without destroying it, forestalling the ruinous machine’s conquest. An alternative or complementary kind of response is to try to avert such machines being built at all, at least while the degree of their apocalyptic tendencies is ambiguous.
The latter approach seems to me like the kind of basic and obvious thing worthy of at least consideration, and also in its favor, fits nicely in the genre ‘stuff that it isn’t that hard to imagine happening in the real world’. Yet my impression is that for people worried about extinction risk from artificial intelligence, strategies under the heading ‘actively slow down AI progress’ have historically been dismissed and ignored (though ‘don’t actively speed up AI progress’ is popular).
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vwK3v3Mekf6Jjpeep/let-s-think-about-slowing-down-ai-1
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
In previous pieces, I argued that there's a real and large risk of AI systems' aiming to defeat all of humanity combined - and succeeding.
I first argued that this sort of catastrophe would be likely without specific countermeasures to prevent it. I then argued that countermeasures could be challenging, due to some key difficulties of AI safety research.
But while I think misalignment risk is serious and presents major challenges, I don’t agree with sentiments along the lines of “We haven’t figured out how to align an AI, so if transformative AI comes soon, we’re doomed.” Here I’m going to talk about some of my high-level hopes for how we might end up avoiding this risk.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rJRw78oihoT5paFGd/high-level-hopes-for-ai-alignment
Narrated by Holden Karnofsky for the Cold Takes blog.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8bcPkqdLYG78YbnTh/ea-and-lw-forums-weekly-summary-5th-dec-11th-dec-22
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Key Takeaways
- Our objective: estimate the welfare ranges of 11 farmed species.
- Given hedonism, an individual’s welfare range is the difference between the welfare level associated with the most intense positively valenced state that the individual can realize and the welfare level associated with the most intense negatively valenced state that the individual can realize.
- Given some prominent theories about the functions of valenced states, we identified over 90 empirical proxies that might provide evidence of variation in the potential intensities of those states.
- There are many unknowns across many species.
- It’s rare to have evidence that animals lack a given trait.
- We know less about the presence or absence of traits as we move from terrestrial vertebrates to most invertebrates.
- Many of the traits about which we know the least are affective traits.
- We do have information about some significant traits for many animals.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnSg6o7crcHFLc395/the-welfare-range-table
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LdEPDqyZvucQkxhWH/ea-and-lw-forums-weekly-summary-28th-nov-4th-dec-22
This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.
client: ea_forum
project_id: summaries
narrator: cs
This week's episode is a little different from our normal programing due to front-ending news and discussion about the FTX situation. If you need someone to talk to, even just to vent, CEA’s community health team is available or you can access peer support set up by Rethink Wellbeing and the Mental Health Navigator here.
Limited emergency funding is available via Nonlinear or the AI Safety Microgrants round.
Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).
Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell.
client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 2h
qa_time: 35m
Excerpt:
This is a linkpost for https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p50vw84-ry2taYmyOIl4B91j7wkCurlB/edit?rtpof=true&sd=true
Key Takeaways* Several influential EAs have suggested using neuron counts as rough proxies for animals’ relative moral weights. We challenge this suggestion. * We take the following ideas to be the strongest reasons in favor of a neuron count proxy: + neuron counts are correlated with intelligence and intelligence is correlated with moral weight, + additional neurons result in “more consciousness” or “more valenced consciousness,” and + increasing numbers of neurons are required to reach thresholds of minimal information capacity required for morally relevant cognitive abilities. * However: + in regards to intelligence, we can question boththe extent to which more neurons are correlated with intelligence and whether more intelligence in fact predicts greater moral weight; + many ways of arguing that more neurons results in more valenced consciousness seem incompatible with our current understanding of how the brain is likely to work; and + there is no straightforward empirical evidence or compelling conceptual arguments indicating that relative differences in neuron counts within or between species reliably predicts welfare relevant functional capacities. * Overall, we suggest that neuron counts should not be used as a sole proxy for moral weight, but cannot be dismissed entirely. Rather, neuron counts should be combined with other metrics in an overall weighted score that includes information about whether different species have welfare-relevant capacities.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Mfq7KxQRvkeLnJvoB/why-neuron-counts-shouldn-t-be-used-as-proxies-for-moral
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 4h
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Excerpt:
What We Owe The Future (WWOTF) by Will MacAskill has recently been released with much fanfare. While I strongly agree that future people matter morally and we should act based on this, I think the book isn’t clear enough about MacAskill’s views on longtermist priorities, and to the extent it is it presents a mistaken view of the most promising longtermist interventions.
I argue that MacAskill:
- Underestimates risk of misaligned AI takeover.
- Overestimates risk from stagnation.
- Isn’t clear enough about longtermist priorities.
I highlight and expand on these disagreements in part to contribute to the debate on these topics, but also make a practical recommendation.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9Y6Y6qoAigRC7A8eX/my-take-on-what-we-owe-the-future
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 4h
qa_time: 30m
Excerpt:
In “How Likely is World War III?”, Stephen suggested the chance of an extinction-level war occurring sometime this century is just under 1%. This was a simple, rough estimate, made in the following steps:
- Assume that wars, i.e. conflicts that cause at least 1000 battle deaths, continue to break out at their historical average rate of one about every two years.
- Assume that the distribution of battle deaths in wars follows a power law.
- Use parameters for the power law distribution estimated by Bear Braumoeller in Only the Dead to calculate the chance that any given war escalates to 8 billion battle deaths
- Work out the likelihood of such a war given the expected number of wars between now and 2100.
Not everybody was convinced. I (Stephen) have to admit that some skepticism is justified. An extinction-level war would be 30-to-100 times larger than World War II, the most severe war humanity has experienced so far. Is it reasonable to just assume number go up? Would the same escalatory dynamics that shape smaller wars apply at this scale?
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PyZCqLrDTJrQofEf7/how-bad-could-a-war-get
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 45m
qa_time: 15m
Excerpt:
We will never know their names. The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it — victims of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done — humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jk7A3NMdbxp65kcJJ/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-more
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
client: ea_forum
project_id: red_team
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 3h15m
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Excerpt:
In this note I’ll summarize the bio-anchors report, describe my initial reactions to it, and take a closer look at two disagreements that I have with background assumptions used by (readers of) the report.
This report attempts to forecast the year when the amount of compute required to train a transformative AI (TAI) model will first become available, as the year when a forecast for the amount of compute required to train TAI in a given year will intersect a forecast for the amount of compute that will be available for a training run of a single project in a given year.
Original article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_GqOrCo29qKly1z48-mR86IV7TUDfzaEXxD3lGFQ8Wk/edit#
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 4h15m
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Excerpt:
Shrimp Welfare Project produced this report to guide our decision making on funding for further research into shrimp welfare and on which interventions to allocate our resources. We are cross-posting this on the forum because we think it may be useful to share the complexity of understanding the needs of beneficiaries who cannot communicate with us. We also hope it will be useful for other organisations working on shrimp welfare, and it’s also hopefully an interesting read!
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nGrmemHzQvBpnXkNX/what-matters-to-shrimps-factors-affecting-shrimp-welfare-in
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
client: ea_forum
project_id: red_team
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 4h14m
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Excerpt:
Long and rough notes on Effective Altruism (EA). Written to help me get to the bottom of several questions: what do I like and think is important about EA? Why do I find the mindset so foreign? Why am I not an EA? And to start me thinking about: what do alternatives to EA look like? The notes are not aimed at effective altruists, though they may perhaps be of interest to EA-adjacent people. Thoughtful, informed comments and corrections welcome (especially detailed, specific corrections!) - see the comment area at the bottom.
"Using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis": that's the idea at the foundation of the Effective Altruism (EA) ideology and movement. Over the past two decades it has gone from being an idea batted about by a few moral philosophers to being a core part of the life philosophy of thousands or tens of thousands of people, including several of the world's most powerful and wealthy individuals. These are my rough working notes on EA. The notes are long and quickly written: disorganized rough thinking, not a polished essay.
Original article:
https://michaelnotebook.com/eanotes/
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
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narrator: pw
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Excerpt:
In both the 1940s and 1950s, well-meaning and good people – the brightest of their generation – were convinced they were in an existential race with an expansionary, totalitarian regime. Because of this belief, they advocated for and participated in a ‘sprint’ race: the Manhattan Project to develop a US atomic bomb (1939-1945); and the ‘missile gap’ project to build up a US ICBM capability (1957-1962). These were both based on a mistake, however - the Nazis decided against a Manhattan Project in 1942, and the Soviets decided against an ICBM build-up in 1958. The main consequence of both was to unilaterally speed up dangerous developments and increase existential risk. Key participants, such as Albert Einstein and Daniel Ellsberg, described their involvement as the greatest mistake of their life.
Our current situation with AGI shares certain striking similarities and certain lessons suggest themselves: make sure you’re actually in a race (information on whether you are is very valuable), be careful when secrecy is emphasised, and don’t give up your power as an expert too easily.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cXBznkfoPJAjacFoT/are-you-really-in-a-race-the-cautionary-tales-of-szilard-and
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like#2022
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
This was written for the Vignettes Workshop.[1] The goal is to write out a detailed future history (“trajectory”) that is as realistic (to me) as I can currently manage, i.e. I’m not aware of any alternative trajectory that is similarly detailed and clearly more plausible to me. The methodology is roughly: Write a future history of 2022. Condition on it, and write a future history of 2023. Repeat for 2024, 2025, etc. (I'm posting 2022-2026 now so I can get feedback that will help me write 2027+. I intend to keep writing until the story reaches singularity/extinction/utopia/etc.)
What’s the point of doing this? Well, there are a couple of reasons:
- Sometimes attempting to write down a concrete example causes you to learn things, e.g. that a possibility is more or less plausible than you thought.
- Most serious conversation about the future takes place at a high level of abstraction, talking about e.g. GDP acceleration, timelines until TAI is affordable, multipolar vs. unipolar takeoff… vignettes are a neglected complementary approach worth exploring.
- Most stories are written backwards. The author begins with some idea of how it will end, and arranges the story to achieve that ending. Reality, by contrast, proceeds from past to future. It isn’t trying to entertain anyone or prove a point in an argument.
- Anecdotally, various people seem to have found Paul Christiano’s “tales of doom” stories helpful, and relative to typical discussions those stories are quite close to what we want. (I still think a bit more detail would be good — e.g. Paul’s stories don’t give dates, or durations, or any numbers at all really.)[2]
- “I want someone to ... write a trajectory for how AI goes down, that is really specific about what the world GDP is in every one of the years from now until insane intelligence explosion. And just write down what the world is like in each of those years because I don't know how to write an internally consistent, plausible trajectory. I don't know how to write even one of those for anything except a ridiculously fast takeoff.” --Buck Shlegeris
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project_id: LessWrong Top Posts
client: ea_forum
project_id: red_team
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 4h15m
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Excerpt:
This post introduces a framework for thinking about population ethics: “population ethics without axiology.” In its last section, I sketch the implications of adopting my framework for evaluating the thesis of longtermism. Before explaining what’s different about my proposal, I’ll describe what I understand to be the standard approach it seeks to replace, which I call “axiology-focused.”
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dQvDxDMyueLyydHw4/population-ethics-without-axiology-a-framework
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qa: km
narrator_time: 3h30m
qa_time: 1h15m
Excerpt:
This essay is a reconciliation of moral commitment and the good life. Here is its essence in two paragraphs:
Totalized by an ought, I sought its source outside myself. I found nothing. The ought came from me, an internal whip toward a thing which, confusingly, I already wanted – to see others flourish. I dropped the whip. My want now rested, commensurate, amidst others of its kind – terminal wants for ends-in-themselves: loving, dancing, and the other spiritual requirements of my particular life. To say that these were lesser seemed to say, “It is more vital and urgent to eat well than to drink or sleep well.” No – I will eat, sleep, and drink well to feel alive; so too will I love and dance as well as help.
Once, the material requirements of life were in competition: If we spent time building shelter it might jeopardize daylight that could have been spent hunting. We built communities to take the material requirements of life out of competition. For many of us, the task remains to do the same for our spirits. Particularly so for those working outside of organized religion on huge, consuming causes. I suggest such a community might practice something like “fractal altruism,” taking the good life at the scale of its individuals out of competition with impact at the scale of the world.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AjxqsDmhGiW9g8ju6/effective-altruism-in-the-garden-of-ends
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narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h30m
qa_time: 35m
Excerpt:
The long-term future of intelligent life is currently unpredictable and undetermined. In the linked document, we argue that the invention of artificial general intelligence (AGI) could change this by making extreme types of lock-in technologically feasible. In particular, we argue that AGI would make it technologically feasible to (i) perfectly preserve nuanced specifications of a wide variety of values or goals far into the future, and (ii) develop AGI-based institutions that would (with high probability) competently pursue any such values for at least millions, and plausibly trillions, of years.
The rest of this post contains the summary (6 pages), with links to relevant sections of the main document (40 pages) for readers who want more details.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KqCybin8rtfP3qztq/agi-and-lock-in
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qa: km
narrator_time: 5h
qa_time: 2h15m
Excerpt:
This is going to be a list of holes I see in the basic argument for existential risk from superhuman AI systems.
To start, here’s an outline of what I take to be the basic case:
I. If superhuman AI systems are built, any given system is likely to be ‘goal-directed’
II. If goal-directed superhuman AI systems are built, their desired outcomes will probably be about as bad as an empty universe by human lights
III. If most goal-directed superhuman AI systems have bad goals, the future will very likely be bad
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zoWypGfXLmYsDFivk/counterarguments-to-the-basic-ai-risk-case
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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
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narrator_time: 2h15m
qa_time: 50m
Excerpt:
Understanding the relationship between wellbeing and economic growth is a topic that is of key importance to Effective Altruism (e.g. see Hillebrandt and Hallstead, Clare and Goth). In particular, a key disagreement regards the Easterlin Paradox; the finding that happiness varies with income across countries and between individuals, but does not seem to vary significantly with a country’s income as it changes over time. Michael Plant recently wrote an excellent post summarizing this research. He ends up mostly agreeing with Richard Easterlin’s latest paper arguing that the Easterlin Paradox still holds; suggesting that we should look to approaches other than economic growth to boost happiness. I agree with Michael Plant that life satisfaction is a valid and reliable measure, that it should be a key goal of policy and philanthropy, and that boosting income does not increase it as much as we might naively expect. In fact, we at Founders Pledge highly value and regularly use Michael Plant’s and Happier Lives Institute’s (HLI) research; and we believe income is only a small part of what interventions should aim at. However, my interpretation of the practical implications of Easterlin’s research differ from Easterlin’s in three ways which I argue in this post.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/coryFCkmcMKdJb7Pz/does-economic-growth-meaningfully-improve-well-being-an
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Excerpt:
I want to know what’s going on in the world. I’m a human; I’m interested in what other humans are up to; I value them, care about their triumphs and mourn their deaths.
But:
- There’s far too much going on for me to keep track of all of it
- I think that some parts of what’s going are likely far more important than others
- I don’t think that regular news providers are picking the important bits to report on
I would really like there to be a scope sensitive news provider which was making a good faith attempt to report on the things which most matter in the world. But as far as I know, this doesn’t exist.
In the absence of such a provider, I’ve spent a small amount of time trying to find out some basic context on what happens in the world on the average day. I think of this as a bit like a cheat sheet: some information to have in the back of my mind when reading whatever regular news stories are coming at me, to ground me in something that feels a bit closer to what’s actually going on.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rXYW9GPsmwZYu3doX/what-happens-on-the-average-day
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project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h
qa_time: 30m
Excerpt:
So far, long-termist efforts to change the trajectory of the world focus on far-off events. This is on the assumption that we foresee some important problem and influence its outcome by working on the problem for longer. We thus start working on it sooner than others, we lay the groundwork for future research, we raise awareness, and so on.
Many longtermists propose that we now live at the “hinge of history”, usually understood on the timescale of critical centuries, or critical decades. But ”hinginess” is likely not constant: some short periods will be significantly more eventful than others. It is also possible that these periods will present even more leveraged opportunities for changing the world’s trajectory.
These “maximally hingey” moments might be best influenced by sustained efforts long before them (as described above). But it seems plausible that in many cases, the best realistic chance to influence them is “while they are happening”, via a concentrated effort at that moment.
Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sgcxDwyD2KL6BHH2C/case-for-emergency-response-teams
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.