It seems like there’s recently been a noticeable uptick in the quality and quantity of animal-related posts by group like Rethink Priorities, Animal Ask, and many others. This puts the movement in a much better place than just a few years ago where it was very hard to know how to effectively help animals.

Just wanted to say this is awesome, and keep up the good work!

Congratulations! Great job by CE and all these founders.

I’m impressed by the “sodium taxation policy advocacy to control hypertension to be 190,927 DALYs per USD 100,000, which is around 300x as cost-effective as giving to a GiveWell top charity” cited in the Centre for exploratory altruism research site.

Thanks Nicole (and I’m impressed how quick you are on the write up)!! I’m so glad people enjoyed it. For other EAG /​ EAGx organisers—this was a great addition to our conference and was great as a tangible next step for what attendees could do to stay further engaged. Would highly recommend.

A bit more context would probably be appreciated, for anyone who does not know the intricacies of the Bernie Madoff story.

Thanks for putting this together! It was my first exposure to a hackathon since it was so well advertised and was open to everyone.

I prefer voting based on value. The other two voting strategies strike me as uncooperative. If you only downvote when you think a score is too high /​ upvote when you think it’s too low, then you’re canceling out someone else’s vote. And if you don’t vote when you think a score is good, then you’re causing someone else’s vote to have zero counterfactual value (because you will upvote if and only if someone else doesn’t upvote).

This was incredibly helpful. I have been struggling with this ambiguity of ‘operations management’ in EA as I am in the midst of my career planning process. Specifically, what I have been wrestling with is that (1) I am incredibly excited about meta-thinking of processes, streamlining, and functioning as a multiplier of high-impact output, and think such a role might be a great personal fit for me, but (2) I have a strong , innate aversion to ‘operations’ work as described in Operations is really demanding (especially due to its overwhelming nature).

This way that ‘operations management’ is used in EA, where it seems to mix both types of work into one with the majority of responsibilities being the ‘assistant’-like work, has actually led me to begrudgingly write off operations management as a career path for now. It does seem that, what I have seen in other comments as well, that most EA organizations might be of smaller size and hence there is no full-time position for the ‘operations manager’ as you describe it. That seems plausible.

I will be mulling over this some more as I am not entirely sure whether the types of operations manager positions you describe—those that excite me—are actually readily available in EA at this moment. If they would be, I’d be strongly considering them as my next move. Thank you for this helpful post!

You might be interested in Gregory Lewis’ person-affecting value of existential risk reduction CE estimate (Guesstimate model), which arrives at a mean ‘cost per life year’ of $1,500-$26,000 (mean $9,200) via this chain of reasoning. My sense is that it’s a lot lower than even your pessimistic estimate mainly due to the person-affecting view constraint, but the takeaways still favor continued work & funding on reducing x-risk. Quoting Lewis:

[There] is a common pattern of thought along the lines of, “X-risk reduction only matters if the total view is true, and if one holds a different view one should basically discount it”. Although rough, this cost-effectiveness Guesstimate suggests this is mistaken. …

The comments section in that post surfaces a number of other x-risk CE estimates too. 80K Hours also has a (simpler) CE estimate. All of them seem pretty conservative.

Another remark is on discount rate, which you didn’t seem to include in your post (maybe I missed it?). The discount rate effectively determines whether long- or near-termism is the best use of philanthropic resources is a post by professional cost-effectiveness modeller Froolow that explores this in more detail, using threshold analysis and assuming exponential discounting (although I suspect many people’s actual discount rates including mine look more like Will MacAskill’s, which is more lay-intuitive if not very mathematically nice).

I’m confused; my understanding is that “the 2% limitation doesn’t apply to contributions from organizations qualifying as publicly supported organizations under section 170(b)(1)(A)(vi)” (quoting p. 6 of the Schedule A instructions) and GiveWell has posted a 2019 letter from IRS affirming that it is a 170(b)(1)(A)(vi) organization. Is GiveWell indicating that this classification is no longer accurate, or am I missing something?

Definitely consult your own legal or accounting advisers rather than relying on an offhand comment from some random person off the Internet who has completed one Schedule A in his life. But you may not have any reason to worry here.

Does R.I.C.E. have an actual website with basic information about the program and the organization (e.g. the federal tax ID)? I wasn’t able to find one based on googling and GiveWell doesn’t link to one . If you don’t have a website currently, I would suspect that the single best thing you could do get more donations from individuals would be to put one together. Going with something like squarespace, you could likely be up and running within a day and have hosting costs in the ~$30/​month range. That’s likely going to be a lot better for getting donors than just a paypal link.

Thank you for the detailed post!

Could you explain a bit further the case for “CENTRE FOR EXPLORATORY ALTRUISM RESEARCH (CEARCH)”? I believe I might have misunderstood something, or missed some details.

The linked report talks about Rethink Priorities, and Open Phil already doing research in this area, but at the same time it is explained that this area is currently “Very neglected”. In this post you also write that the plan is to

(a) identify 1000 causes, (b) narrowed down on a cause that is at least 10x more cost-effective than top GiveWell charities

I am sincerely very happy that there are more people coming into this area, as I believe the requirements and dedication necessary for joining Open Phil is rather high, and having people who are not 95% perfect, yet still doing research in this area would be still valuable.

However, isn’t it a bit too confident that CEARCH would identify a 1000 causes that RP or OpenPhil couldn’t find? To me it just seems so counter intuitive where OpenPhil /​ RP wouldn’t hire people for this, but somehow making a new organization makes sense? Or at least where is this confidence coming from? Is it really beneficial to start a new organization, compared to just joining the already existing ones?

Truly my only wish is to fully understand so that I can focus my personal goal into areas that need support. Thank you again!
Vlad

WOW

See also “A Fable of Science and Politics” (Yudkowsky, 2006).

I vote mainly based on the first

I’m working with some EAs who’re working on starting an org to work on furthering EA-aligned public-health policy in the MINA region. They’re trying to make contacts with people who’ve done similar work (in other parts of the world). Please message me if you are/​know someone who I can connect them with

Vaccination using cowpox seems to be the kind of technologies that didn’t require a lot of “prerequisites” in its way. I wonder how different history would’ve been if cowpox was discovered much earlier, and cowpox-vaccination became a widespread practice in at least some regions before the 1000s or so.

Could smallpox eradictation be achieved on a national/​regional level in a pre-industrial society? And how much would that change the course of history?

Hi Maya,

Thanks for sharing your experience! I hope it improves.

Hold yourself and your people accountable. What we do and say informs who we are. If you see someone, especially someone you’re close to, say or do something you disagree with or that you believe contributes to an unwelcoming culture, let them know. This is especially relevant to people you call your friend. In order to do good better, we must aim to make ourselves better too.

I really like this point.

Personally, I vote according to a combination of the 3 norms described above, but wonder about the weight I should give to each one.

Just noting for posterity that the OPs’ organisation Pronatalist.org got a $482,000 grant from the Survival & Flourishing Fund in the second 2022 round: https://​​survivalandflourishing.fund/​​sff-2022-h2-recommendations

Ideology in EA

I think the “ideology” idea is about the normative specification of what EA considers itself to be, but there seem to be 3 waves of EA involved here:

1. the good-works wave, about cost-effectively doing the most good through charitable works

2. the existential-risk wave, building more slowly, about preventing existential risk

3. the longtermism wave, some strange evolution of the existential risk wave, building up now

I haven’t followed the community that closely, but that seems to be the rough timeline. Correct me if I’m wrong.

From my point of view, the narrative of ideology is about ideological influences defining the obvious biases made public in EA: free-market economics, apolitical charity, the perspective of the wealthy. EA’s are visibly ideologues to the extent that they repeat or insinuate the narratives commonly heard from ideologues on the right side of the US political spectrum. They tend to:

• discount climate change

• distrust regulation and the political left

• extoll or expect the free market’s products to save us (TUA, AGI, …)

• be blind to social justice concerns

• see the influence of money as virtuous, they trust money, in betting and in life

• admire those with good betting skills and compare most decisions to bets

• see corruption in government or bureaucracy but not in for-profit business organizations

• emphasize individual action and the virtues of enabling individual access to resources

I see those communications made public, and I suspect they come from the influences defining the 2nd and 3rd waves of the EA movement, rather than the first, except maybe the influence of probabilism and its Dutch bookie thought experiment? But an influx of folks working in the software industry, where just about everyone sees themselves as an individual but is treated like a replaceable widget in a factory, know to walk a line, because they’re still well-paid. There’s not a strong push toward unions, worker safety, or ludditism. Social justice, distrust of wealth, corruption of business, failures of the free market (for example, regulation-requiring errors or climate change), these are taboo topics among the people I’m thinking of, because it can hurt their careers. But they will get stressed over the next 10-20 years as AI take over. As will the rest of the research community in Effective Altruism.

Despite the supposed rigor exercised by EA’s in their research, the web of trust they spin across their research network is so strong that they discount most outside sources of information and even have a seniority-skewed voting system (karma) on their public research hub that they rely on to inform them of what is good information. I can see it with climate change discussions. They have skepticism toward information from outside the community. Their skepticism should face inward, given their commitments to rationalism.

And the problem of rationalized selfishness is obvious, big picture obvious, I mean obvious in every way in every lesson in every major narrative about every major ethical dilemma inside and outside religion, the knowledge boils down to selfishness (including vices) versus altruism. Learnings about rationalism should promote a strong attempt to work against self-serving rationalization (as in the Scout Mindset but with explicit dislike of evil), and see that rationalization stemming from selfishness, and provide an ethical bent that works through the tension between self-serving rationalization and genuine efforts toward altruism so that, if nothing else, integrity is preserved and evil is avoided. But that never happened among EA’s.

However, they did manage to get upset about the existential guilt involved in self-care, for example, when they could be giving their fun dinner-out money to charity. That showed lack of introspection and an easy surrender to conveniently uncomfortable feelings. And they committed themselves to cost-effective charitable works. And developing excellent models of uncertainty as understood through situations amenable to metaphors involving casinos, betting, cashing out, and bookies. Now, I can’t see anyone missing that many signals of selfish but naive interest in altruism going wrong. Apparently, those signals have been missed. Not only that, but a lot of people who aren’t interested in the conceptual underpinnings of EA “the movement” have been attracted to the EA brand. So that’s ok, so long as all the talk about rationalism and integrity and Scout Mindset is just talk. If so, the usual business can continue. If not, if the talk is not just smoke and mirrors, the problems surface quick because EA confronts people with its lack of rationality, integrity, and Scout Mindset.

I took it as a predictive indicator that EA’s discount critical thinking in favor of their own brand of rationalism, one that to me lacks common-sense (for example, conscious “updating” is bizarrely inefficient as a cognitive effort). Further, their lack of interest in climate destruction was a good warning. Then the strange decision to focus ethical decisions on an implausible future and the moral status of possibly existent trillions of people in the future. The EA community shock and surprise at the collapse of SBF and FTX has been further indication of what is a lack of real-world insight and connection to working streams of information in the real world.

It’s very obvious where the tensions are, that is, between the same things as usual: selfishness/​vices and altruism. BTW, I suspect that no changes will be made in how funders are chosen. Furthermore, I suspect that the denial of climate change is more than ideology. It will reveal itself as true fear and a backing away from fundamental ethical values as time goes on. I understand that. If the situation seems hopeless, people give up their values. The situation is not hopeless, but it challenges selfish concerns. Valid ones. Maybe EA’s have no stomach for true existential threats. The implication is that their work in that area is a sham or serves contrary purposes.

It’s a problem because real efforts are diluted by the ideologies involved in the EA community. Community is important because people need to socialize. A research community emphasizes research. Norms for research communities are straightforward. A values-centered community is … suspect. Prone to corruption, misunderstandings about what community entails, and reprisals and criticism to do with normative values not being served by the community day-to-day. Usually, communities attract the like-minded. You would expect or even want homogeneity in that regard, not complain about it.

If EA is just about professionalism in providing cost-effective charitable work that’s great! There’s no community involved, the values are memes and marketing, the metrics are just those involved in charity, not the well-being of community members or their diversity.

If it’s about research products that great! Development of research methods and critical thinking skills in the community needs improvement.

Otherwise, comfort, ease, relationships, and good times are the community requirements. Some people can find that in a diverse community that is values-minded. Others can’t.

A community that’s about values is going to generate a lot of churn about stuff that you can’t easily change. You can’t change the financial influences, the ideological influences, (most of) the public claims, and certainly not the self-serving rationalizations, all other things equal. If EA had ever gone down the path of exploring the trade-offs between selfishness and altruism with more care, they might have had hope to be a values-centered community. I don’t see them pulling that off at this point. Just for their lack of interest or understanding. It’s not their fault, but it is their problem.

I favor dissolution of all community-building efforts and a return to research and charity-oriented efforts by the EA community. It’s the only thing I can see that the community can do for the world at large. I don’t offer that as some sort of vote, but instead as a statement of opinion.

The general argument is that it’s just a useful but imperfect proxy, your findings are that it correlates with some stuff we might find just imperfectly so how do you go from being imperfect to ‘shouldnt be used’ again?

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Some interventions are neglected because they have less emotional appeal. EA typically tackles this by redirecting more resources there. The authors suggest we should also tackle the cause, by designing marketing to make them more emotionally appealing. This could generate significant funding, more EA members, and faster engagement.

As an example, the Make-A-Wish website presents specific anecdotes about a sick child, while the Against Malaria Foundation website focuses on statistics. Psychology shows the former is more effective at generating charitable behavior.

Downsides include potential organizational and personal value drift, and reduction in relative funding for Longtermist areas if these are harder to produce emotional content for. They have high uncertainty and suggest a few initial research directions that EAs with a background in psychology could take to develop this further.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

Absolutely agree that development aid is very important and that a lot of the money is not spent on very good projects. Glad to see that the thread also notes that some of this is inevitable because major donors have many different competing priorities.

I look forward to hearing more about how this organization will be different from others which are already thinking about aid effectiveness. I think there’s definitely a huge problem here and space for a new approach.

I think this thread might be overestimating the tractability of this problem… Aid effectiveness definitely isn’t a new topic—there have been lots of lobbying efforts, Paris agreements, Accra agenda. etc. Organizations like Centre for Global Development have been looking at these issues for a long time and obviously there are lots of researchers and academics in this space.

In my experience development agencies are slow to update their practices (but quicker to organize interminably long workshops about updating practices). E.g. we’ve known for some time that cash transfers are an effective way of doing humanitarian aid in many/​most contexts—and we still see that they are not the common way of doing things.

I am so excited about this project.

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
AI startups can be big money-makers, particularly as capabilities scale. The author argues that money is key to AI safety, because money:

• Can convert into talent (eg. via funding AI safety industry labs, offering compute to safety researchers, and funding competitions, grants, and fellowships). Doubly so if the bottleneck becomes engineering talent and datasets instead of creative researchers.

• Can convert into influence (eg. lobbying, buying board seats, soft power).

• Is flexible and always useful.

The author thinks another $10B AI company would be unlikely to counterfactually accelerate timelines by more than a few weeks, and that money /​ reduced time to AGI tradeoff seems worth it. They also argue that the transformative potential of AI is becoming well-known, and now is the time to act to benefit from our foresight on it. They’re looking for a full-stack developer as a cofounder.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
SoGive is an EA-aligned research organization and think tank. In 2022, they ran a pilot grants program, granting £223k to 6 projects (out of 26 initial applicants):

• Founders Pledge - £93,000 - to hire an additional climate researcher.

• Effective Institutions Project - £62,000 - for a regranting program.

• Doebem - £35,000 - a Brazillian effective giving platform, to continue scaling.

• Jack Davies - £30,000 - for research improving methods to scan for neglected X-risks.

• Paul Ingram - £21,000 - poll how nuclear winter info affects nuclear armament support.

• Social Change Lab - £18,400 − 2xFTE for 2 months, researching social movements.

The funds were sourced from private donors, mainly people earning to give. If you’d like to donate, contact isobel@sogive.org.

They advise future grant applicants to lay out their theory of change (even if their project is one small part), reflect on how you came to your topic and if you’re the right fit, and consider downside risk.

The give a detailed review of their evaluation process, which was heavy touch and included a standardized bar to meet, ITN+ framework, delivery risks (eg. is 80% there 80% of the good?), and information value of the project. They tentatively plan to run it again in 2022, with a lighter touch evaluation process (extra time didn’t add much value).

They also give reflections and advice for others starting grant programs, and are happy to discuss this with anyone.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

A quickly written model of epistemic health in EA groups I sometimes refer to

I think that many well intentioned ea groups do a bad job cultivating good epistemics. By this I roughly mean the culture of the group does not differentially advantage truthseekjng discussions or other behaviours that helps us figure out what is actually true as opposed to what is convenient or feels nice.

I think that one of the main reasons for this is poor gatekeeping of ea spaces. I do think groups do more and more gate keeping, but they are often not selecting on epistemics as hard as I think they should be. I’m going to say why I think this is and then gesture at some things that might improve the situation. I’m not going to talk at this tjme about why I think it’s important—but I do think it’s really really important.

EA group leaders often exercise a decent amount of control over who should be part of their group (which I think is great). Unfortunately, it’s much easier to evaluate what conclusion a person has come to, than how good were their reasoning processes. So what does a person actually say they think becomes the filter for who gets to be in the group as opposed to how do they think. Intuitively you’d expect a positive feedback loop where groups become worse and worse epistemically as people are incentivised to think a certain way to be part of the group and future group leaders are drawn from a pool of people with bad epistemics and then reinforce this.

If my model is right there are I a few practical takeaways • be really careful about who you make a group leader or get to start a group (you can easily miss a lot of upside that’s hard to undo later) • make it very clear that your EA group is a place for truth seeking discussion potentially at the expense of being welcoming or inclusive • make rationality/​epistemics a more core part of what your group values, idk exactly how to do that—I think a lot of this is making it clear that this is what your group is in part about

I’m hoping to have some better takes on this later, I would strongly encourage the cea groups team to think about this along with other ea group leaders. I don’t think many people are working in this area though I’d also be sad if people fill up the space with low quality content so think really hard about it and try to be careful about what you post.

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Rob paraphrases Nate’s thoughts on capabilities work and the landscape of AGI organisations. Nate thinks:

1. Capabilities work is a bad idea, because it isn’t needed for alignment to progress and it could speed up timelines. We already have many ML systems to study, which our understanding lags behind. Publishing that work is even worse.

2. He appreciates OpenAI’s charter, openness to talk to EAs /​ rationalists, clearer alignment effort than FAIR or Google Brain, and transparency about their plans. He considers DeepMind and Anthropic on par and slightly ahead respectively on taking alignment seriously.

3. OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind are unusually safety-conscious AI capabilities orgs (e.g., much better than FAIR or Google Brain). But reality doesn’t grade on a curve, there’s still a lot to improve, and they should still call a halt to mainstream SotA-advancing potentially-AGI-relevant ML work, since the timeline-shortening harms currently outweigh the benefits.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

Hey Arepo,

I’ve been taking time off work and haven’t been looped into any of CEA’s discussions about media strategy, so here I’m speaking only for myself.

Clearly recent events have been a disaster in terms of media, which means we should reassess our strategies, so at a high level, I agree.

However, I think I mostly disagree with what I understand to be the more specific claims. I’ve tried to split these up as follows:

1. CEA has a policy of minimising the total amount of media engagement.

2. EA should have sought even more media coverage than it did in recent years.

3. CEA’s policy is effectively EA’s policy.

4. There should be a wider range EA public figures, but CEA has prevented this.

5. A significantly wider range of people in the community should speak to the media even if they don’t have approval or training from others in EA.

Here are some very brief comments on why I disagree or feel very unsure about these. These are big topics so it’s hard to give much of my reasoning.

On 1) my understanding (not speaking for them) is that CEA had a policy of minimising engagement around 2017-2019 (along the lines of the fidelity post), but my understanding is that from 2020 onwards they became significantly more pro media coverage. EA then received dramatically more media coverage 2020-2022 than it did 2017-2019. This uptick can be seen on 80k’s media page: https://​​80000hours.org/​​about/​​media-coverage/​​ and then there were also the campaigns for the Precipice, WWOTF etc.

That said, with regards to FTX they seem to have reverted to a policy of less engagement. What to do here just seems like a really hard call to me. You point out there’s a high proportion of negative coverage, but I don’t see a straightforward route to drowning that out with new positive coverage in the current environment. A more realistic option would be to try to more to make the coverage less bad (and there is some of this happening) or do more to tell our own narrative about what happened; but that could easily have the effect of EA being given greater prominence in the negative stories, or make whatever narrative the journalist has more credible etc.

On 2) I feel pretty unsure even more media coverage would have been better.

One point is that it seems likely that EA is getting way more negative coverage now because it was fresh in journalists’ minds from Will’s summer media campaign. If there had been less coverage of EA over the summer, I expect there would be fewer negative articles about EA now. So overall I’m tempted to draw the lesson from this that less media is better.

Another point is that most surveys I’ve seen show that only ~5% of people come into EA via the media, but the media is how most people have heard of EA. This means it creates only a small fraction of community members, but perhaps the majority of haters. I think that suggests there’s still a lot to be said for a strategy that involves a small media footprint (i.e. maybe you get 95% of the recruitment but with only 20% of the haters).

On noisy fuckers, I think the EA Hotel is a bad look for EA. Although turning the journalist away at the door also worked out badly in hindsight, I think the bigger mistake was accepting the journalist’s invite in the first place, so if anything I think this example updates me towards a stronger non-engagement policy.

(Also the fact that the journalist came even after you’d turned down the interview is pretty aggressive of him, suggesting the story could have been a lot worse.)

The way I agree with (2) is that it’s a big shame there wasn’t more positive coverage out about longtermism 1-2 years ahead of the launch of WWOTF, which would have meant Torres didn’t drive the discourse around it as much as they did.

More broadly, generating high-profile positive coverage is hard—pushing into more marginal opportunities can easily lead to stories that are more ambiguously positive, or simply have little reach, or require doing a ton of work, and there’s always the question of opportunity costs.

On 3), I think you’re overstating CEA’s influence. The large orgs (GiveWell, OP, FP, TLYCS, ACE, 80k, Singer etc) all have their own outreach people and decide their own strategy. CEA provides advice to some of these orgs, but I wouldn’t say it’s the main driver of what’s happened in recent years. Far more funding comes from OP than CEA. CEA does not ‘appoint’ the representatives of EA.

On 4), I agree it would be great if there were more EA public figures, and having a small number of faces of EA is a big risk for the reasons you say. But my impression is that Will, CEA and 80k have all been trying to find and encourage such people. (If you’re reading this and interested in trying, please apply to 80k advising asap.)

The reason it hasn’t happened isn’t because CEA doesn’t want it, but rather because it’s a shitty and difficult job. Even if someone can match e.g. Toby in terms of communication skills and charm, very few people can tell the kind of story he can, and match the level of coverage he’s able to get. And results are heavy-tailed – it’s almost bound to be that a couple of people receive the majority of the coverage. (Unless those people step back, in which case the total amount of coverage will likely drop.)

So I would really like this to change, but I think it’s going to be a slow process.

On 5), I disagree for similar reasons that others have said in the thread. It’s pretty hard to make media go well and generate positive coverage. I think if lots more people tried without making it a major focus of theirs, the results are as likely to be bad as good.

Since media coverage affects the brand of the whole movement, I think it’s an area where it’s easy to be unilateralist, so it’s reasonable to adopt a rule of thumb like “if a significant number of people think this coverage would be bad, don’t do it.” I’m not sure how this should be implemented in practice, and maybe right now things are too centralised, but I think something like having a media team who can provide quick guidance on whether something seems good or bad seems like a reasonable way to go.

I’m sorry I don’t have more positive suggestions about how things should change going forward (and they probably should) but maybe this helps identify the best criticisms of the old approach.

ACE has 4 top charities

Wild Animal Initiative → not involved with livestock , irrelevant to discussion

Faunalytics → involved in research and making research more accesible, impact valuable but very hard to measure in the way that makes “ offsetting” work as a concept .

Good Food Institute → plant-based-alternative industry lobbying group, probably useless, considering There is no association between rising plant-based-meat sales and lowered meat sales.

The Humane League->mainly focused on “ improving” livestock welfare ( not decreasing the number of animals farmed) , has been a major force in the “ cage-free” push even-though Industrial-cage-free Egg farms tend to have higher mortality rates ( meaning more farmed animals per Kcal) than conventional farms. almost certainly net negative and should be tossed to the side.

You complain about hypotheticals far removed from reality, and then offer up one. There is no EA recognized organization that you could possibly use to offset the number of animals raised for your animal-product consumption. Donating to an ACE top charity means one of these four, one bad, one useless, one irrelevant, and one to difficult to quantify the impact of. People who claim to be offsetting There meat consumption ( is any one actually doing this???) are not.

I’ve see many comments about how many days of a year the Abbey can be reasonably used for EA events.

On the days that EA are not hosting events, the venue could also be rented out for conferences for other organizations , so we should take those into account as well.

This is helpful, thanks for sharing!

I worry that most people here don’t have timelines, just vibes.

And when AI does something scary, they go, “Look, I was espousing doomy vibes and then AI did something that looks doomy! Therefore I am worth paying more attention to!”

Or, “Hm, I was more into global development but the vibes are AI now. Maybe I should pull my old doomist uniform out of the closet.”

If that sounds like something you’re doing reader, maybe reconsider?

I’m confused why people keep insisting this is a “CEA” decision even after Owen Cotton-Barratt’s clarification (which I assume everyone commenting has read).

I see the process on deciding to purchase Wytham Abbey as:

1. Owen Cotton-Barratt made a proposal to spend ~$15M for a conference center

2. His funder(s) were willing to give him money.

3. Effective Ventures agreed to be a fiscal sponsor.

To the extent that anyone is responsible for this decision, it’s primarily (1) Owen, and (2) his funder(s). I don’t think (3) is much to blame here. Also, CEA the organization is distinct from EV, their fiscal sponsor.

I think if you think this is an ineffective use of limited resources, you absolutely should feel entitled to critique it! In many ways this is what our movement is about! But I think you should place the burden of blame on the actual decision-makers, and not vaguely associated institutions.

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The author asks whether EA aims to be a question about doing good effectively, or a community based around ideology. In their experience, it has mainly been the latter, but many EAs have expressed they’d prefer it be the former.

They argue the best concrete step toward EA as a question would be to collaborate more with people outside the EA community, without attempting to bring them into the community. This includes policymakers on local and national levels, people with years of expertise in the fields EA works in, and people who are most affected by EA-backed programs.

Specific ideas include EAG actively recruiting these people, EA groups co-hosting more joint community meetups, EA orgs measuring preferences of those impacted by their programs, applying evidence-based decision-making to all fields (not just top cause areas), engaging with people and critiques outside the EA ecosystem, funding and collaborating with non-EA orgs (eg. via grants), and EA orgs hiring non-EAs.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

This sort of estimate is in general off by many orders of magnitude for thinking about the ratio of impact between different interventions when it only considers paths to very large numbers for the intervention under consideration, and not to reference interventions being compared against. For example, the expected number of lives saved from giving a bednet is infinite. Connecting to size-of-the-accessible-universe estimates, perhaps there are many simulations of situations like ours at an astronomical scale, and so our decisions will be replicated and have effects on astronomical scales.

Any argument purporting to show <20 OOM in cost-effectiveness from astronomical waste considerations is almost always wrong for this kind of reason.

Highly Pessimistic to Pessimistic-Moderate Estimates of Lives Saved by X-Risk Work

This short-form supplements a post estimating how many lives x-risk work saves on average.

Following are four alternative pessimistic scenarios, two of which are highly pessimistic, and two of which fall between pessimistic and moderate.

Except where stated, each has the same assumptions as the original pessimistic estimate, and is adjusted from the baseline estimates of 10^16 lives possible and one life saved per hour of work or $100 donated.

1. It is 100% impossible to prevent existential risk, or it is 100% impossible to accurately predict what will reduce X-risk. In this case, we get an estimate that in expectation, on average, x-risk work may extremely pessimistically have zero positive impact and have the negative impact of wasting resources. I think it is somewhat unreasonable to conclude with absolutely certainty an existential catastrophe is inevitable or unpredictable, but others may disagree.

2. Humanity lasts as long as the typical mammalian species, ~1 million years. This would lead to three orders of magnitude reduction in expected value from the pessimistic estimate, giving an estimate that over the next 10,000 years, in expectation, on average, x-risk work will very pessimistically save one life for every 1,000 hours of work or every $100,000 donated. *Because humanity goes extinct in a relatively short amount of time in this scenario, x-risk work has not technically sustainably prevented existential risk, but this estimate has the benefit of using other species to give an outside view.

3. Digital minds are possible, but interstellar travel is impossible. This estimate is highly speculative. My understanding is that Bostrom estimated 15 additional orders of magnitude if digital minds are possible, given that we are able to inhabit other star systems. I have no idea if anything like this holds up if we only inhabit earth. But if it does, assuming a ¹⁄₁₀ chance digital minds are possible, the possibility of digital minds gives a 14 orders of magnitude increase from the original pessimistic estimate so that, over the next 10,000 years, in expectation, on average, x-risk work will moderately pessimistically save approximately one trillion lives per minute of work or per dollar donated.

4. Interstellar travel is possible, but digital minds are impossible. Nick Bostrom estimates that if emulations are not possible and so humans must remain in biological form, there could be 10^37 biological human lives at 100 years per life, or 21 orders of magnitude greater than the original pessimistic estimate. Assuming a ¹⁄₁₀ chance interstellar travel is possible, this adds 20 orders of magnitude so that, over the next 10,000 years, in expectation, on average, x-risk work will moderately pessimistically save approximately a billion billion (10^18) lives per minute of work or per dollar donated.

My first comment! Thanks for the guidance Aaron, glad to be here.

There’s several people or entities who did not seek FTX funding or consequential associations with SBF.

I think individuals who did this because they had private negative information, or the ability to perceive FTX or SBF’s enterprises accurately prior to November, should be somewhat rewarded in states of the world where FTX fails due to fraud.

It seems like there are strange and bad community effects if the opposite is true, especially if impact is much more difficult than it seems, funding or status gradients are distorted, and evaluating communication and expertise in a public setting is made further difficult than it already was.

I think this post is very accurate, but I worry that people will agree with it in a vacuous way of “yes, there is a problem, we should do something about it, learning from others is good”. So I want to make a more pointed claim: I think that the single biggest barrier to interfacing between EAs and non-EAs is the current structure of community building. Community-building is largely structured around creating highly-engaged EAs, usually through recruiting college students or even high-school students. These students are not necessarily in the best position to interface between EA and other ways of doing good, precisely because they are so early into their careers and don’t necessarily have other competencies or viewpoints. So EA ends up as their primary lens for the world, and in my view that explains a sizable part of EA’s quasi-isolationist thinking on doing good.

This doesn’t mean all EAs who joined as college students (like me) end up as totally insular—life puts you into environments where you can learn from non-EAs. But that isn’t the default, and especially outside of global health and development, it is very easy for a young highly-engaged EA to avoid learning about doing good from non-EAs.

Forewarning: I have not read your post (yet).

I argue that moral offsetting is not inherently immoral

(I’m probably just responding to a literal interpretation of what you wrote rather than the intended meaning, but just in case and to provide clarity:) I’m not aware of anyone who argues that offsetting itself is immoral (though EAs have pointed out Ethical offsetting is antithetical to EA).

Rather, the claim that I’ve seen some people make is that (some subset of) the actions that would normally be impermissible (like buying factory farmed animal products or hiring an assassin) can be permissible if the person doing the action engages in the right kind of offsetting behavior, such as donating money to prevent factory farmed animal suffering or preventing an assassination.

I bring up the assassination example because we’d pretty much all agree that that hiring an assassin is impermissible regardless of what offsetting behavior one does to try to right this wrong. For people who agree that hiring an assassin is wrong regardless of any offsetting behavior, but think there are some other kinds of generally impermissible actions (e.g. buying animal products) that become permissible when one engages in a certain offsetting behavior, I’d be interested in hearing what you think the difference is that makes it apply to the one behavior but not to the hiring of the assassin. (If this is what the OP blog post does, let me know and I’ll give it a read.)

I’m also curious if there are less controversial examples than buying animal products where most people agree that offsetting behavior is sufficient to make a generally impermissible action permissible.

Thanks Kieran, this is very interesting! I would also be quite keen to hear about what RP has tried and didn’t go so well. For example, I know RP has been trying to launch the Insect Welfare Project (or whatever it’ll be called ultimately) since early 2021 or so. I know you had to re-hire for this recently as the last executive director left, so I was wondering if you could share some learnings from that? For example:

• How come it’s taken longer than anticipated for the Insect Welfare Project to launch and start running programs?

• What mistakes do you think you made in this process?

• How will this change the approach to which you incubate new organisations?

etc. This list is non-exhaustive so would be keen to hear other useful lessons from this experience! Sorry if this comes across as critical, as it’s not my intention, but I’m genuinely curious on what’s been happening re Insect Welfare Project as it’s a much needed endeavour.

Really happy to see this! Thanks to those working on it.

> In response to the recent extraordinary need, Jaan Tallinn, the main funder of SFF, is doubling speculation budgets.

Increasing the budgets this year seems like a solid move to me.

I think longtermist organizations should be planning for a smaller funding environment in the future. However, in the near-term, it seems really good to cover the immediate and urgent obligations.

I imagine that in the worst case, if not many great groups actually apply, you could just fund like a normal year.

Will you consider applications for specific projects or only for the general operating expenses of the entire organization?

Great program, thanks for sharing. Can individuals apply, or is this funding only available for charitable organizations?

I think I agree with this. I’ve thought of starting one myself. Not sure if I will yet.

Here, I wrote about how AI applied to non-profits could be neglected at the moment.

Great article, thanks for sharing!

That’s awesome! I was a big fan of the article and agree it’s useful to have a more fleshed-out and stylish version to share more widely.

Did Mathias pitch WiP, or did you reach out to him to suggest he write the piece?

Good lord… am I the only one shedding a tear? This post is one helluva heavy dose of fuzzies and if you are a hug person I’d love to give you a virtual hug for making my morning, if you consent. Thank you so much for all the effort put into this warm post. It is appreciated. Ganna go off to do my earn to give coding with a smug smile on my face now.

commons plural noun [treated as singular] land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community

The reputation of effective altruism is a commons. Each effective altruist can benefit from and be harmed by it (it can support or impede one’s efforts to help others), and each effective altruist is capable of improving and damaging it.

I don’t know whether actions that may cause substantial harm to a commons should be decided upon collectively. I don’t know whether a community can come up with rules and guidelines governing them. But I do think, at minimum, in the absence of rules and guidelines, that one should inform the community when planning a possibly-commons-harming action, so that the community can at least critique one’s plan.

I think purchasing Wytham Abbey (which may have made sense, even factoring in the reputational effects—I’m not sure) was a possibly-commons-harming action, and this sort of action should probably be announced before it’s carried out in future.

I like all of your suggested actions. Two thoughts:

1) EA is a both a set of strong claims about causes + an intellectual framework which can be applied to any cause. One explanation for what’s happening is that we grew a lot recently, and new people find the precooked causes easier to engage with (and the all-important status gradient of the community points firmly towards them). It takes a lot of experience and boldness to investigate and intervene on a new cause.

I suspect you won’t agree with this framing but: one way of viewing the play between these two things is a classic explore/​exploit tradeoff.^[1] On this view, exploration (new causes, new different people) is for discovering new causes.^[2] Once you find something huge, you stop searching until it is fixed.

IMO our search actually did find something so important, neglected, and maybe tractable (AI) that it’s right to somewhat de-emphasise cause exploration until that situation begins to look better. We found a combination gold mine /​ natural fission reactor. This cause is even pluralistic, since you can’t e.g. admire art if there’s no world.

2) But anyway I agree that we have narrowed too much. See this post which explains the significance of cause diversity on a maximising view, or my series of obituaries about people who did great things outside the community.

1. ^

   I suspect this because you say that we shouldn’t have a “singular best way to do good”, and the bandit framing usually assumes one objective.

2. ^

   Or new perspectives on causes /​ new ideas for causes /​ hidden costs of interventions /​ etc

Wolesome content :)

How does the above take into account access to things like state welfare, access to infrastructure etc. And how it interacts with GDP?

My guess is that even if you boosted GDP it’s not clear if those gains are the same without those other pieces or if you did boost GDP you’d necessarily get those kinds of state investment or support (because of limited or inefficient use of government resources). But I’m sure there is research on this that I’m missing!

(I also have no economics background)

De-emphasizing cause neutrality could(my guess is) probably would reduce the long-term impact of the movement substantially. Trying to answer the question “How do the most good”, without attempting to be neutral between causes we are passionate about and causes we don’t (intuitively) care that much about would bias us towards causes and paths that are interesting to us rather than particularly impactful causes. Personal fit and being passionate about what you do is absolutely important, but when we’re trying to compare causes and comparing actions/​careers in terms of impact(or ITN), our answer shouldn’t be dependent on our personal interests and passions, but when we’re taking action based on those answers then we should think about personal fit and passions, as these prevent us from being miserable while we’re pursuing impact. And also, cause neutrality should nudge people against associating EA with a singular cause like AI Safety or global development or even 80k careers, I think extreme cause neutrality is a solution to the problem you describe, rather than being root of the problem.
De-emphasizing cause neutrality would increase the likelihood of EA becoming mainstream and popular, but it would also undermine our focus and emphasis on impartiality and good epistemics, which were/​are vital factors why EA was able to identify so many high-impact problems and take action to tackle those problems effectively imho.

Interesting article—thanks for sharing. My main problem with it has to do with the moral psychology piece. You write that:

It’s “disgusting and counterintuitive” for most people to imagine offsetting murder.

and

“Most of us still live in extremely carnist cultures and are bombarded with burger ads and sights of people enjoying meat next to us all the time like it is perfectly harmless.”

In my opinion, these two arguments together make meat offsets a bad idea. People are opposed to murder offsets (no matter how theoretically effectively they may be) because murder feels like a deeply immoral thing to do. However, most people feel that eating meat is not deeply immoral—most people do it every day. I’d imagine folks react the same way to meat offsets as they do to carbon offsets. They think, “well I know I probably shouldn’t eat so much meat /​ consume so much carbon, but I’m not gonna stop, so this offset makes some sense”. But this is the wrong way to think about eating meat (and perhaps consuming carbon, too, but that’s beside the point). We want people to feel that eating meat is immoral; we want them to feel that it’s a form of killing a sentient being. And the availability of an offset trivializes the consumption.

I’m on board with your consequentialist reasoning here, but I’m worried the availability meat offsets may cause people’s moral opinion on animal ethics to regress.

Hey Harrison! This post evaded me until now. I am sorry to hear that you are not going to continue working on this. I hope that you will still follow progress of other projects, and that you will chime in with feedback when some of the people working on similar things post about it i the future!

Just wanted to answer this edited question:

Edit to add: If this expense has been made a while back, why not announce it then?

They did mention it on August 2nd:

What is Wytham Abbey?

The project is under development. In time, all being well, it will function as a workshop venue in Oxford.

Although I would like to point out that it was going to be revealed in the New Yorker a few days later.

Last year, the Centre for Effective Altruism bought Wytham Abbey, a palatial estate near Oxford, built in 1480.

It is possible that they were allowed to preview the article and were trying to get ahead of it.

I agree that publishing results of the form “it turns out that X can be done, though we won’t say how we did it” is clearly better than publishing your full results, but I think it’s much more harmful than publishing nothing in a world where other people are still doing capabilities research.

This is because it seems to me that knowing something is possible is often a first step to understanding how. This is especially true if you have any understanding of where this researcher or organisation were looking before publishing this result.

I also think there are worlds where it’s importantly harmful to too openly critique capabilities research, but I lean towards not thinking we are in this world, and think the tone of this post is a pretty good model for how this should look going forwards. +1!

Strong agree. I think the EA community far overestimates its ability to predictably affect the future, particularly the far future.

I am quite new to EA and here are some of my novice thoughts reading this post:

• I am non white and non male and usually have a very low threshold for when social gatherings make me feel aware of those two facts. EA community has hardly made me feel so.

• I am neurodivergent as well, my partner for the last 2 years was too. I’d say I am more emotionally present than outright Aspergers but I have also seen my request to consider sider emotions and rational explanations for them have been we’ll appreciated and incorporated into actions by my partner. Our relationship gets stronger the more it is talked about. The phrasing of ‘shouldnt do Xyz cz it will alienate aspy EAs’ is very biased IMO. And counterproductive to the issue

• As much as we hate it, EA has a status issue. EA forum is a place for elite (written) stuff. I have heard people say they hate posts talking about emotional stuff/​experiences or anything that is not jargon or math heavy. I don’t know what to do about it, I am just saying OPs experience rings a bell.

• I have been hit on at EAGs when not seeking that, it is as annoying as it ever is. I usually brush it off by rationalising that the person probably has a terrible social radar (aspy) and doesn’t know how to not act. Hence I don’t report it thinking ‘probably wasnt their intention’. I realise doing so never addresses the issue

• As someone who has been broken up with before because someone acted on a joke told to them in a very serious 80k career call, cz they thought that was the right thing to do even if that broke them, I know that groups running EA cannot entirely control the actions of aspy members. But EAs do respond to well rounded discussions and numbers. We just need to open up dialogue about this.

• I recently worked for an EA organization and went in expecting loving caring environment to solve the best problems. I left feeling burnt out, unheard and drowned in the religiousness of the cause. Might be an isolated singular experience but I was tired of feeling guilty for taking time off for myself. Even though doing that was highly encouraged explicitly. -How many new EAs have stopped doing things that they derived pleasure from after joining? Stopped having out with Non-EA friends because ‘they don’t get it’ or ‘its too much to explain’. How many miss both things? - good polling qns IMO. Go out and grab a boba tea with that one friend that chats a lot about Netflix. You will be fine. Better even.

(I have written this in bed without being mindful of using jargon to appeal to a certain group of people. I intended to do that.)

This is a nice post that should help people better grasp the magnitudes of income gaps across countries and the importance of growth. I’d only add two things:

1. Regarding growth, the issue in LICs usually isn’t actually speeding up growth, it’s sustaining growth. Basically every country has experienced periods of Chinese level growth rates (Malawi’s GDP growth data here). The main issue is that in poorer countries these spells are shorter and they are often followed by periods of negative growth.

2. The development community is very much aware of these arguments, as are EA people that overlap both communities (hi). The reason people gravitate towards things like bed nets is purely on tractability. Somewhat crudely speaking, the last time that outsiders tried seriously to reform institutions in LICs in order to promote growth was the period of IMF structural adjustment in the 80s and 90s and that wasn’t exactly a huge success. This is basically why there was a shift towards “randomista” development i the 2000s. As a matter of history, the development community goes back and forth on this macro vs. micro question every 20ish years, so I suppose we’re due for a swing towards growth again.

will add this opportunity to the EA Opportunity board!

I’m on the side of value alignment being much more important than people often think as it’s hard to get anywhere if people want to go five different ways and it’s easy for organisational culture to be diluted in the absence of an explicit effort to maintain it.

That said, outside of community-building roles, particular frames are more important than whether a person identifies as EA (someone can have these frames without identifying as EA or lack them when identifying as an EA). These include attempting to do the most good that you can do^[1], respect for evidence and reason and a willingness to step outside of the social reality. You can find people like this outside of the EA community, but it’s much rarer outside of people who are at least EA adjacent.

I’d be much more open to bringing in experienced non-EA’s who don’t necessarily have these attributes in advisory capabilities.

1. ^

   This does not imply being a naive maximiser.

I am skeptical of the FOOM idea too, but I don’t think most of this post argues effectively against it. Some responses here:

1.0/​1.1 - This seems nonobvious to me. Do you have examples of these superlinear decays? This seems like the best argument of the entire piece if true, and I’d love to see this specific point fleshed out.

2 - ELO of 0 is not the floor of capability. ELO is measured as a relative ranking of competitors, and is not an objective measure of chess capability—it doesn’t start at “You don’t know how to play at 0”, it starts at 1200 being defined as the average chess player who plays enough ELO matches to be stably ranked, then goes up and down from there based on victories or losses.

You also have to compare potential, not just actual skill. A beginner might be close to a chimpanzee in Chess ability, but give me a median human who has never played Chess before and a chimpanzee, then give me a few hours or a few days to train them both, and I predict we will see a very swift capabilities jump for the human relative to the chimp. Similarly, I bet there was a point in its training process where I was a superior Go player to AlphaGo. That didn’t last long.

As for the general relativity example—I think you’re looking at the wrong measurement, here. Large language models often have “emergent” properties where they suddenly become able to do something (e.g, 3-digit multiplication) that they couldn’t do before, but if you measured their general maths ability (Say, via a 2-digit addition task), you would find it was increasing with scale long before the model reached the level of mathematics required to do 3-digit multiplication correctly even occasionally. “Ability to invent general relativity” is impossible for both a rock and the median human, and yet the median human would still outperform a rock on a cognitive test to measure scientific acumen. If two agents are equally incapable or capable of performing a specific task, that does not make them equal in the underlying domain of that task.

In addition, both Chess and Go are bounded domains. I wouldn’t be surprised if Magnus Carlsen was closer in ELO to an unbounded superintelligence than a median human, because once you’ve solved chess you’ve hit an ELO ceiling, and adding more intelligence doesn’t help. It is possible that an ELO of 4500+ is legitimately impossible. This probably does not generalise to real-world domains.

3 - I don’t see how this acts as an argument against recursive self-improvement. It doesn’t matter if an AGI would lose to a specialised Chess bot of the same level. That does not stop it from FOOMing. If recursive self-improvement is possible, the AI just has to reach a certain capability level in each of X domains. This can be achieved eventually even if each X could be individually reached faster by a specialised machine.

4 - This is not an argument against FOOM, this is just a description of what the world might look like if FOOM does not happen and is not possible.

5 - I agree with you that superintelligence requires a very high level of strongly superhuman cognitive abilities. In a world where FOOM-level improvement is possible, these levels will be reached anyway. This is, again, not an argument that argues against FOOM—it seems more an argument of “If FOOM is not possible, we won’t get a singleton through ordinary capabilities improvements”.

In short—point 1 is a reasonable crux and I agree that if 1.0 and 1.1 were true, this would mean a recursively self-improving AI would quickly hit a ceiling of diminishing returns. I’d like to see a more detailed argument for why this would be expected.

Point 2 appears to have several misconceptions that are pretty fundamental to the understanding of what capabilities are and how they scale.

Points 3-5 do not, to me, seem to argue against the possibility of FOOM at all. They are interesting points, in that they argue against the concept of a singleton in the event that FOOM is not possible, but they don’t present in argument in favor of that being the case.

Do I have this right—Functionalism doesn’t support spending more on small invertebrates?

Conscious Subsystems probably supports spending far more on small invertebrates -->

Functionalism doesn’t support conscious subsystems

Great post. I’d love to see an entire post on this:

Acknowledging good-faith intentions and attempts to help others

Maybe have it pinned to the top of every page. :-)

I think a big problem with FOOM is error propagation. For example, if an initial AI believes the earth is flat with probability ~1, then that belief will form part of the benchmark for evaluating the “next step up” AI. Non flat-earther AI’s will be rejected for their “crazy”(from the AI’s perspective) beliefs that the earth is round. Continue this up the chain, and you end up with a “super” AGI with an unwavering belief in flat earth conspiracy theories.

The same would apply to other, less noticeable errors in beliefs and reasoning, including beliefs about how to build better AI. Every attempt at foom is going to hampered by the initial flaws of the origin AI.

What I’m wondering is why the benifactor gave the money for the building to EV rather than buying the building themselves and just allow EV to use it for free. This would likely have avoided all the optics issues and I guess would have had some other advantages.

Given that much of existential risk is made up of human-caused events stemming from issues that can be mitigated by policy and better governance, this intervention is even more important.

This logic is also the core intuition behind why I’ve been so passionate about voting reform (and social choice reform in general). Some thoughts:

For better voting methods to translate into better risk policy, I assume that it’d be necessary for the public to strongly desire to fix the problem. In the case of climate change, we see a strong movement to address that [1], so I wouldn’t be surprised to see Approval electing representatives who are much better at addressing climate problems than those elected under choose-one voting (or Instant Runoff /​ Ranked Choice, which is basically iterated choose-one voting, and suffers from many, but not all of the same flaws).

However, when it comes to biorisk security and AI-notkilleveryoneism, I am concerned that the public is not nearly passionate enough about these issues to improve our governance on these issues. That said, there are two dynamics that might end up making Approval beneficial anyways. The first, is that Approval might increase the bandwidth of the Overton window /​ what people feel comfortable being politically passionate about. Choose-one voting naturally makes elections a choice between two major candidates, and this turns elections into a tug-of-war along a one-dimensional axis. Issues that are orthogonal to this axis will not be relevant, and people who are passionate about such orthogonal issues are, in my observations, perceived as “weird” by most people.

Because Approval can support elections that are competitive across many issues at once, this may give voters an incentive to be passionate about issues they currently are not passionate about under choose-one, and this would propogate to representatives (the propagation would be faster than we currently observe under Choose-one)

Secondly, even if this dynamic does not play out, the existing concern about climate change and nuclear weapons could end up (with Approval) giving politicians an incentive to take more action against these risks, and that some of that action may end up translating to a framework designed to handle existential risk in general. I feel more cynical about that possibility, but if there’s even a partial manifestation of the first dynamic I name, that might be able to push it over the edge to actually make a difference.

Or Approval might just end up being more of a nothing-burger. In my head, the arguments for why it will help make sense, but it’s possible after we run the experiment of actually getting it implemented, it helps with less than I hope it can help with. But that’s not the most likely outcome in my estimation, and in any case, it’s important to invest in actually implementing Approval in the real world, to see how things actually play out.

[1] We also observe a strong backlash to this movement, but my model is that this is a consequence of the impact the currently prevalent choose-one voting system has on our political system. Duverger’s law translates a choose-one system into politics that are more-or-less polarized into two camps. When one of these camps is passionate about an issue, and becomes associated with that issue, members of the opposing camp end up being incentivized (for signaling reasons) to downplay the issue, and even to take a vocal opposing stance on the issue, even if that opposing stance is poorly justified.

I expect that under Approval, this dynamic will not at all play out, due to the centripetal (centre-finding) nature of the voting system.

It’s a great overview.

Some things I find missing/​underemphasized in the Defense section:

• Ventilation is mentioned briefly, mentioning that achieving aircraft-level ventilation (20 air changes/​hour, ACH) is expensive and noisy. But substantial reduction already comes at 6ACH, and 12 ACH is really good (but would probably not stop Omicron BA1-level transmission in an immunologically naive population). Enforcing air quality standards in transport hubs seems a sensible and valuable policy to me.

• Broad-spectrum antivirals aren’t empathized because they would be circumventable and face distribution issues. The first seems not a strong reason: a number of antiviral medications together would very significantly constrain the option space. There are also plenty of immunosupportive therapeutics in development that would be hard to circumvent. I would think production would be a bigger issue than distribution? Stockpiling seems like the obvious solution.

• There’s decent evidence of certain nasal sprays (containing eg povidone iodine or carrageenan) being broadly effective against airborne pathogens. These could be stockpiled, freely distributed/​cheaply promoted at travel hubs, or added to people’s daily routines (e.g. like washing hands and brushing teeth)

Regarding Detection:

• I’m not sure how long it will take to convince institutions to do air sampling. As an intermediate solution, air sampling could also be crowdsourced. There are people measuring CO2 levels everywhere they go. Let them take swabs from the outside of their respirators or portable air filters and send it to a lab?

I’ve been curious about foreign aid for a while, but never delved into researching it. I would be curious to follow more posts or a newsletter on it . Some questions off the top of my head:

• how effective (i.e. $ per DALY/​QALY) is x country’s aid budget in y year, how does this compare to givewells best interventions?

• what does the talent pipeline look like for foreign aid, who works in these departments/​orgs?

• what underline assumptions or biases influence foreign aid?

• case studies of projects done well. Case studies of projects done poorly.

Also, curious if you have any book recommendations?

[weirdness-filter: ur weird if you read m commnt n agree w me lol]

Doing private capabilities research seems not obviously net-bad, for some subcategories of capabilities research. It constrains your expectations about how AGI will unfold, meaning you have a narrower target for your alignment ideas (incl. strategies, politics, etc.) to hit. The basic case: If an alignment researcher doesn’t understand how gradient descent works, I think they’re going to be less effective at alignment. I expect this to generalise for most advances they could make in their theoretical understanding of how to build intelligences. And there’s no fundamental difference between learning the basics and doing novel research, as it all amounts to increased understanding in the end.

That said, it would in most cases be very silly to publish about that increased understanding, and people should be disincentivised from doing so.

(I’ll delete this comment if you’ve read it and you want it gone. I think the above can be very bad advice to give some poorly aligned selfish researchers, but I want reasonable people to hear it.)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Some suffering is bad enough that non-existence is preferable. The lock-in of uncompassionate systems (eg. through AI or AI-assisted governments) could cause mass suffering in the future.

OPIS (Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering) has until now worked on projects to help ensure that people in severe pain can get access to effective medications. In future, they plan to “address the very principles of governance, ensure that all significant causes of intense suffering receive adequate attention, and promote strategies to prevent locked-in totalitarianism”. One concrete project within this is a full length film to inspire people with this vision and lay out actionable steps. They’re looking for support in the form of donations and /​ or time.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

While I do think there is some merit in the argument that the purchase ultimately yields a net positive, I’m a bit more skeptical than most of the benefits of specialist venues, if you consider all the possible alternatives:

• A lot of intellectual work can be done remotely (the EA and rationalist forums being a good example of this)

• Ordinary intellectual work which needs in person collaboration can happen in an office

• Freer types of intellectual work which need in person collaboration can sometimes be successfully accomplished by just picking a convenient place for people to meet, such as a particular person’s house, a café, or, if you’re lucky enough, a park

• And if you need more space and quiet, you can more cheaply rent access to a large house somewhere in the country, in a way that more than offsets the additional costs of transportation, as many companies do for their yearly retreats. (This assumes a rich country such as the UK). In France, for example, it is 15 times more expensive to rent a few square feet of Parisian real state than a whole manor deep in the country.

• Unless you need specific equipment, of course, in which case ou definitely require some kind of “lab”.

With that being said, I have a sense that the same purchasing decision would have raised no eyebrows had it been made by the University of Oxford itself. Such decisions are made by the University of Oxford all the time. (Well, perhaps student activists would have found something to protest about it, but it would have been linked to some symbolic matter about the history of the place rather than the financials).

To the extent that the Centre of Effective Altruism is pursuing a long term intellectual project that seeks to study how to do the most good with the same rigor the University of Oxford brings to other endeavours, either you should not be shocked by this, or you should be shocked by the fact that the University of Oxford owns so much real estate. (I am generally more puzzled than shocked about things, so I’ll leave it up to you to determine which angry emotion this evokes.)

This however does not seem to be the case. I am not too familiar with EA institutions, but it seems to me that the Centre of Effective Altruism is more akin to the seat of a movement of people trying to be altruistic in a particular way. As a result, it becomes an organization which—whether inadvertently or not—advertises its own goodness. “We are good, and you should be good like us too”. For a number of complex reasons, people have a mental model that members of a movement of this kind should live in relative frugality and that if they don’t, they are hypocrites. (Perhaps they should live like monks… say, in a religious building made of stone surrounded by lush greenery. But also… it shouldn’t be called an abbey, and they should be poor. Funny creatures aren’t we.)

Not sure what to make of this, but it would seem to have implications for the proper delineation of “intellectual” and “movement” wings of EA, as well as the consideration of optics whenever switching from “is”to “ought” modes.

There are some good arguments for buying this thing, but why were these things below not done? I struggle to find arguments against these important actions which seem like basic due diligence. I would appreciate people giving reasons why these things might not have happened as I haven’t seen it no the thread.

1. Publish publicly information about big spends when they happen

2. Clearly state the reasons for the purchase including positives, potential negatives and counterfactuals in laymans terms.

3. Publish the math on this vs. running conferences elsewhere. If Givewell can do it, surely CEA can publish their math.

4. Acknowledge publicly that although on balance the purchase was judged t be worthwhile, the optics are likely to look terrible to most people, who (whether right or wrong) are likely to see it as supposed do gooders buying themselves a mansion.

I’m not against this purchase (uncertain), but confused why these steps weren’t taken when it was bought, and haven’t been done yet (although this can be rectified). I’m not asking for democracy, only asking for both the core principles of EA to be published and a bare minimum of transparency.

And one extra point, I think after the SBF scandal, a higher degree of transparency than before will be needed to turn this negative PR tide.

Thanks for writing this. Do you already have an idea(s) for such a startup? I’d be happy to forward the doc to friends who fit what you’re looking for but it might go farther if you included potential ideas you’re deliberating on.

FWIW, I see a huge potential for AI startups to do a lot of good + make money in India. The amount of inefficiencies + market size bc of population + increasing exposure to the digital + Indian-specific things like the need to translate b/​w 30+ languages = equals tons of opportunity. Ofc a lot of ppl are working on capitalizing on such (ik ppl working on applications of AI in law, education, healthcare) but there’s still a lot of low-middle hanging fruit.

You probably might have came across it already, but the Good Food Institute (GFI) has compiled a research funding database for alternative proteins (here).

Overall I think having collaborators that have the expertise and facilities to perform biological experiments and bioprocessing may be quite crucial. My experience is that at this moment, publicly available data are scarce and insufficient to support purely computational work in this field, unlike say cancer research where loads of multi-omics data are available for data mining and modeling.

Where do you draw the line between AI startups that do vs don’t contribute excessively to capabilities externalities and existential risk? I think you’re right that your particular startup wouldn’t have a significant effect of accelerating timelines. But if we’re thinking AI startups in general, this could be another OpenAI or Adept, which probably have more of an effect on timelines.

I could imagine that even if one’s startup doesn’t working on scaling and making models generally smarter, a relatively small amount of applications work to make them more useful could put them at notably greater risk of having dangerous capabilities or intent. As an example, imagine if OpenAI only made GPT-3 and never produced InstructGPT or ChatGPT. It feels a lot harder to steer GPT-3 to do useful things, so I think that there would have been noticeably less adoption of LLMs and interest in advancing their capabilities, at least for a while. (For clarification, my claim isn’t that InstructGPT and ChatGPT necessarily contributed to existential risk, but they do have capabilities externalities and I think affected timelines, in part due to the hype they generated.)

OurWorldinData also wrote something like this and had a visualization too

Ethiopia has a much lower average income: an increase of average incomes is called economic growth and to increase the average from $3.30 per day to $55 would mean that Ethiopia would need to increase its income 16.7-fold (because $55 is 16.7-times higher than $3.30).⁸
[. . .]
A more than 16-fold increase in average incomes is certainly not easy to achieve, but it is also not impossible. The average income in Denmark grew by more than that over the last few generations, and such growth is not rare in recent economic history.

[. . .]
The minimum necessary growth to reduce global poverty to the level of poverty in Denmark is 410%.¹⁰

An increase by 100% would mean that the size of the economy would double. A 410% increase is therefore a 5.1-fold increase of the global economy.

Or put differently, a world economy with substantially less poverty is at a minimum 5-times bigger than today’s global economy.”

In general, it is a bad idea to trade increased probability that the world ends for money if your goal is to decrease probability that the world ends. People are usually bad at this kind of consequentialism, and this definitely strikes my ‘galaxybrain take’ detector.

And to the “but we’ll do it safer than the others” or “we’ll use our increased capabilities for alignment!” responses, I refer you to Nate’s excellent post rebutting that line of thought.

Including wild fish (including those caught for fishmeal) can be misleading and hard to get right:

1. The price elasticity of supply of wild-caught fish can be negative when there’s overfishing, because reducing fishing pressure (the percentage of the population caught per period) allows the population to recover enough to allow more fish to be caught in the long run. In well-managed fisheries with quotas, the elasticity should be basically 0 when the quotas are binding. It can be positive if there’s underfishing and either there’s no quota or catch is below the quota. So the number of fishing deaths could actually increase from eating less fish, or animal products from animals fed fishmeal.

2. Wild-caught fish populations might increase in fisheries from reducing demand (if there’s no quota that’s binding). It’s not clear those lives are worth living having more of on average. Also, of course if the population increases, so will deaths, just not necessarily due to fishing (although fishing deaths may increase, too, if overfishing). On the other hand, the populations of their prey may decrease in response. Is this a good trade? Even anchovies eat crustaceans.

Even if someone considers the impact of a post to be high, regardless of how much karma it has, it doesn’t necessarily mean much because that doesn’t discern the worth of the post.

“Impact” needs to be operationalized and it remains infeasible to achieve a consensus on how it should be operationalized. It might be possible in theory to achieve agreement on what counts as an objectively valuable post, though in practice the criteria anyone applies for judging the value of any posts might as well be completely arbitrary.

For example, if my preferred cause is shared as a top priority only by a small minority of the effective altruism community, like invertebrate suffering, every post about that cause will receive way less karma than most other posts. That doesn’t change the facts that:

1. I’ll consider the most valuable posts to be ones that have a below-average karma score among all posts.

2. the posts most effective altruists consider the most impactful may not matter to me much at all.

Once someone becomes a more independent-minded effective altruist, how much post a karma receives matters way less.

• The Centre for Effective Altruism has had to deal with a lot of questions about Bankman-Fried since FTX’s collapse. Here’s an FAQ it put together.

This is not true. The FAQ was not put together by CEA, and so far as I know Hamish has no affiliation with CEA (nor did he ever claim to).

This is an interesting post, and I’m glad you wrote it.

People are driven by incentives, which can be created with cash in a variety of ways

I agree with these ways, but I think it’s quite hard to manage incentives properly. You mention DARPA, but DARPA is a major bureacracy comprised of people who are aligned to their own incentive structures, and ultimately the most powerful organization in the world (the US government). Such a thing does not exist in AI safety—not even close. Money would certainly help with this, but it certainly can’t just be straightforwardly turned into good research.

Where is that money going to come from? How are they going to fine-tune the latest models when OpenAI is spending billions?

It’s unclear to me that having EA people starting an AI startup is more tractable than convincing other people that the work is worth funding. It certainly works faster to convince people who already have money now, vs. creating people who might make money later. I don’t really have a strong opinion, but this doesn’t seem wholly justified.

It’s frustratingly difficult to predict what will actually be useful for AI Safety...But money is flexible. It’s hard to imagine a world where another billion doesn’t come in handy.

I don’t see how the flexibility of money makes any difference? Isn’t it frustratingly difficult to predict which uses of money will actually be useful for AI safety? In that case, you still have the same problem.

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
CEA follows a fidelity model of spreading ideas, which claims because EA ideas are nuanced and the media often isn’t, media communication should only be done by those qualified who are confident the media will report the ideas exactly as stated.

The author argues against this on four points:

1. Sometimes many people doing something ‘close to’ is better than few doing it ‘exactly’ eg. few vegans vs. many reductitarians.

2. If you don’t actively engage the media, a large portion of coverage will be from detractors, and therefore negative.

3. EA’s core ideas are not that nuanced. Most critics have a different emotional response or critique how it’s put into practice, rather than get anything factually wrong.

4. The fidelity model contributes to hero worship and concentration of power in EA.

The author suggests further discussion on this policy, acknowledgement from CEA of the issues with it, experimenting with other approaches in low-risk settings, and historical /​ statistical research into what approaches have worked for other groups.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Since Sandra Malagón and Laura González were funded to work on growing the Spanish-speaking EA community, it’s taken off. There have been 40 introductory fellowships, 2 university groups started, 2 camps, many dedicated community leaders, translation projects, 7-fold activity on Slack vs. 2020, and a community fellowship /​ new hub in Mexico City. If you’re keen to join in, the slack workspace is here, and anyone (English or Spanish speaking) can apply to EAGxLatAm.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Wealthy countries spend a collective $178B on development aid per year − 25% of all giving worldwide. Some aid projects have been cost-effective on a level with Givewell’s top recommendations (eg. PEPFAR), while others have caused outright harm.

Aid is usually distributed via a several step process:

1. Decide to spend money on aid. Many countries signed a 1970 UN resolution to spend 0.7% of GNI on official development assistance.

2. Government decides a general strategy /​ principles.

3. Government passes a budget, assigning $s to different aid subcategories.

4. The country’s aid agency decides on projects. Sometimes this is donating to intermediaries like the UN or WHO, sometimes it’s direct.

5. Projects are implemented.

This area is large scale, tractability is unsure but there are many pathways and some past successes (eg. a grassroots EA campaign in Switzerland increased funding, and the US aid agency ran a cash-benchmarking experiment with GiveDirectly), and few organisations focus on this area compared to the scale.

The author and their co-founder have been funded to start an organization in this area. Get in touch if you’re interested in Global Development and Policy.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The US poverty threshold, below which one qualifies for government assistance, is $6625 per person for a family of four. In Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, the median income is a twelfth of that (adjusted for purchasing power). Without a change in growth rates, it will take Malawi almost two centuries to catch up to where the US is today.

This example illustrates the development gap: the difference in living standards between high and low income countries. Working on this is important both for the wellbeing of those alive today, and because it allows more people to participate meaningfully in humanity’s most important century and therefore help those in the future too.

(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

This is my favourite drama. In my interpretation it’s more about AI risk (the last idea we need, the invention of all inventions), but Durrenmatt was limited by the technology of his age. I mean, if you think Solomon is the AI character, then the end of the play is about Solomon excaping the “box” while trapping their creators inside.

I strongly agree.

I miss discussions about “how we can make EA mainstream” or “bring EA to academia”.

While I find the EA community to be a great source of personal and social value, we still face the challenge of significantly scaling everything we do. Taking informed steps to doing good better shouldn’t be a side consideration for governments, NGOs or people, it should be the default. Working to systematically address existential risk shouldn’t be the work of a few nonprofits, it should be the work of national and international institutions.

If we over-emphasize community building while at the same time de-prioritizing engaging with the outside world, we risk that vision. There are significant advantages to working inside a community (and we should leverage those!), but to be truly successful, we first have to learn how to communicate with the outside world.

For group organizers, one step we could take is prioritize working with existing institutions and experts in different fields. Instead of only inviting EAs to events, we could invite more experts working in related areas. Instead of only networking with EA institutions, we could work more closely with traditional institutions from different fields. ^[1]

This probably means navigating difficult tradeoffs, in handling outreach and press, in compromising ideas and in producing less “highly-engaged EAs”, but I think this is a discussion worth having.

1. ^

   This is already happening in the policy space (out of necessity). There’s also plenty of precedent from other EA groups (especially if they’re specialized), but I don’t think it’s nowhere there yet.

Good portrait of the problem. The solution isn’t obvious to me.

I’m very skeptical of the suggestions from the Halstead and Hillebrandt post. It seems unlikely that a “~4 person-year research effort” could discover the key to economic growth in developing countries when the entire field of development economics has been trying to solve this problem for decades.

This is an amazing guide ❤️ Thank you for sharing!! I’d also be curious to see a post with more details on building the Spanish-speaking EA community (what you’ve done, what’s been successful, etc) as a model for other community building efforts

I agree with the general premise of earning to give through entrepreneurship.

I’ve never been very convinced by the talent-constraint concept. With the right wage you can hire talent. I think the push from earning to give has been a mistake.

To add, I and some other EAs were recently recruited to an INFER Forecasting Tournament by Manuel Carranza, a pro-forecaster on INFER from Mexico City, which I thought was cool. (His EA Forum profile)

Great!

I think that the allocation of government aid doesn’t get enough attention from effective altruists. Government aid budgets are an enormous pool of money and often don’t seem to be spent in an evidence-based way. Huge potential for positive change here.

https://​​airtable.com/​​shrhg9qqXPUSkunOX/​​tblenBvhle1Zp2rRr

Can someone explain the spreadsheet in the linked story like I’m five?

I enjoyed reading this and would love to see more upbeat and celebratory posts like this. The EA community is very self-critical (which is good!) but we shouldn’t lose sight of all the awesome things community members accomplish.

https://​​www.mopp-journal.org/​​go-to-main-page/​​calls-for-papers/​​ A call for papers on longermism on the Moral philosophy and politics journal

Hi there. I’m a water resource engineer working out of Austin, Texas.

One thing you might find interesting is the concept of ASR (Aquifer Storage and Recovery), in which wells are used to pump water into aquifers during times when the area is oversupplied such as an intense rain event or from surface level sources. This method prevents the water from evaporating or running off and keeps it relatively clean and pathogen free if treated before re-injection. The city of San Antonio has a 60 MGD facility where they inject water from the Edwards aquifer (through which water runs very quickly, causing variable flow rates) and into the Carrizo aquifer, which is mostly comprised of sand, and retains the water much longer.

Here’s a link from COA
https://​​www.austintexas.gov/​​sites/​​default/​​files/​​files/​​Water/​​WaterForward/​​AW_ASR_Factsheet.pdf

FYI: this post has been linked to by this article on Semafor, with the description:

The Centre for Effective Altruism has had to deal with a lot of questions about Bankman-Fried since FTX’s collapse. Here’s an FAQ it put together.

I don’t think you’re from CEA… Right?

That was an interesting article. It’s fascinating to see that we can measure groundwater depletion by changes in satellite velocity due to different gravity.

But I’m confused-the worst places seem to be losing around 4 cm per year of groundwater (like northern India). Even if that means 4 cm of “solid” water (is it?) and the porosity of the soil/​rock is 10%, that would be 40 cm drop per year of the water table. If it’s feasible to pump when the water level falls 100 m, that would be a 250 year supply. Of course people do pump from deeper, but that may tend to be subsidized. There were claims in the paper of much greater groundwater depletion, like 6.5 feet (2 m) per year in Yemen, but there was no citation for that.

“The Kansas peak use arrived in 2009. But during 2012 – one year after the last picture in this series – its harvests had dropped by nearly 30%.”

I quickly tried to find Kansas food production as a function of time-do you know what it was?

Since irrigation produces about 40% of total calories (I think of just crops, not including grazing which is vast majority rain fed) and about 20% of that is using unsustainable “fossil” water, that means we would lose about 8% of production after all the fossil water is depleted (if we could not produce any crop on the land without irrigation, which is pessimistic). If this occurred over 30 years, that would be about 1/​4% per year of food production loss.

This is not an existential risk in itself, but it is one more way our civilization is unsustainably consuming limited resources and heading for a crash.

Relative to business as usual of unlimited groundwater, food prices would be higher, and we would likely have to put more of the land that used to be used for crop growth back into production, but I would not characterize it as heading for a crash.

Agua Via is a startup company developing a new atomic-scale low-energy fluid filtering technology. It could be used to purify contaminated water for human consumption and other uses, removing small-molecule and larger contaminants. It has a much smaller energy cost than reverse osmosis or distillation.

Sounds promising, not only for wastewater reclamation for irrigation/​drinking, but could it also be used to recycle minerals?

This post argues against a strawman—it’s not credible that utilitarianism endorses frauding to give. It’s also not quite a question of whether Sam “misconstrued” utilitarianism, in that I doubt that he did a rational calculus on whether fraud was +EV, and he denies doing so.

The potential problem, rather, is that naive consequentialism/​act utilitarianism removes some of the ethical guardrails that would ordinarily make fraud very unlikely. As I’ve said: In order to avoid taking harmful actions, an act utilitarian has to remember to calculate, and then to calculate correctly. (Whereas rules are often easier to remember and to properly apply.) The way Sam tells it, he became “less grounded” or “cocky”, leading to these mistakes. Would this have happened if he followed another theory? We can’t know, but we should be clear-eyed about the fact that hardcore utilitarians, despite representing maybe 1/​1M of the world’s population, are responsible for maybe ¹⁄₁₀ of the greatest frauds, i.e. they’re over-represented by a factor of 100k, in a direction that would be pretty expected, based on the (italicised) argument above (which must surely have been made previously by moral philosophers). For effective altruists, we can lop off maybe one order of magnitude, but it doesn’t look great either.

Sam and his leadership group, primarily, created FTX, but I agree that EA & utilitarianism also deserve a lot of the blame.

EA created FTX

The entire financial operation was expressly set up by funding from top Effective Altruists.

The article discusses how some effective altruists were the earliest donors to FTX. Since they funded it at that stage, lots of non-EA funding/​talent/​publicity came in.

> I think we previously saw EA as resembling a victim in this scenario, but I am curious how that understanding evolves at this moment as we learn more.

It’s a complicated situation. I think it’s definitely possible to give early-on support to a project that eventually really bites you. Similar to early unsuspecting investors of other orgs that later did some bad things.

For comparison’s sake: https://​​www.zillow.com/​​homedetails/​​2824-Scott-St-San-Francisco-CA-94123/​​80753377_zpid/​​

Most suggestions I see for alternative community norms to the ones we currently have seem to throw out many of the upsides of the community norms they’re trying to replace.

When trying to replace community norms, we should try to preserve the upsides of having the previous community norms.

Almost all community norms we currently have have many upsides we should try to maintain.

A significant fraction of the focus going into reevaluating community norms feels misplaced.

Most of the focus going into reevaluating community norms feels misplaced.

I am a bit confused by the key question /​ claim. It seems to be some variant of “Powerful AI may allow the development of technology which could be used to destroy the world. While the AI Alignment problem is about getting advanced AIs to do what their human operator wants, this could still lead to an existential catastrophe if we live in such a vulnerable world where unilateral actors can deploy destructive technology. Thus actual safety looks like not just having Aligned AGI, but also ensuring that the world doesn’t get destroyed by bad or careless or unilateral actors”

If this is the claim, seems about right, and has been discussed a lot both online and offline. Powerful AI itself might be that destructive technology, hence discussion of Deployment and Coordination problems. See here. Some other relevant resources: here, here.

As you asked for feedback,

If I am not mistaken, “AI Alignment” seems to mean getting AI to do what we want without harmful side effects, but “AI Safety” seems to imply keeping AI from harming or destroying humanity.

I would say the distinction isn’t so clear and the semantics don’t seem too important; what matters is that those in the field of AI Alignment and AI Alignment broadly are aimed at getting good outcomes for humanity.

I guess your claim might actually be “Powerful AI may be a precipitating factor for other risks as it allows the development of many other, potentially unsafe, technologies.” This seems technically true but is unlikely to be how the world goes. Mainly I expect one of two outcomes:

1. humanity is disempowered or dead from misaligned AI;

2. we successfully align AGIs and solve the deployment problem which results in a world which where no single actor can cause an existential catastrophe.

The reason I think that no single actor can cause existential catastrophe in 2 is that this seems to be a likely precursor to avoiding dying to misaligned AGI. I would recommend the above links for understanding this intuition. I may be wrong here because it may be that the way we avoid misaligned AGI is by democratizing aligned-AGI-creation tech (all the open source libraries include Alignment properties including preventing misuse); but maybe the filters for preventing misuse are not sufficient for stopping people from developing civilization-destroying tech in the future (but probably given such a filter we would already be dead from misaligned AGI that somebody made by stress-testing the filters).

Sorry for scattered thoughts

Mi (sub)comunidad favorita de EA ❤️❤️❤️

This is honestly really embarrassing. I’ve read the comments and I don’t want to argue that the economic calculus doesn’t stack up, but the optics here makes this extremely EV negative. Every journalist is looking for material to write about EA since the SBF debacle and this kind of stuff is prime material.

Individual high profile media pieces can significantly reduce donations for years and years, kill startups and organisations and make it harder to find people to partner with due to lowered reputation. I have friends, colleagues and family message me about Wytham abbey and it makes me embarrassed, they are now less likely to donate to causes we care about here. I will not defend this decision to them, regardless of what the economic calculus around conferences/​event costs says.

I got into EA for the empathetic and rational approach to doing good and I will continue donating to EA causes and using EA methodology for those same reasons. However, for outsiders, EA is a coherent “movement” that you “support” by donating. This must be taken into consideration when you act under the “EA brand”. This movement is big now and needs to be careful about the way this brand is managed, because, as unsexy as it is, both current and future donations depends on that brand.

Will all the results of the survey be shared publicly on EA Forum? I couldn’t find mention about this in the couple announcements I’ve seen for this survey.

It looks like at least some of the 2020 survey results were shared publicly. [1, 2, 3] But I can’t find 2021 survey results. (Maybe there was no 2021 EA Survey?)

Hey Mathias, I’ve work in development here in Northern Uganda for 10 years, and I think this is a fantastic idea for an org. I love your examples and I have no doubt that this issue is tractable, although I’ve failed in my own feeble local efforts here in Northern Uganda ;). Here’s a couple of comments off the top of my head :). I could go on and on but it’s too much for a comment .

• My experience has been that most government aid projects are terrible, either doing harm or very little good at all. The worst are government-to-government aid, where unfortunately most of the aid money goes as spelled out well in Dambisa Moyo’s “Dead Aid” book. Here in Uganda there are some great high impact exceptions such as USAID’s Pepfar, providing free malaria commodities, and some results based healthcare projects (although these can go both ways) but they are exceptions not the rule.
  
  We currently have GIZ (German development agency with an unfortunate name) spending millions here in Northern Uganda doing lot’s of close to zero impact projects while causing potential harm while they are at it. Their projects are so painfully bad it sometimes makes me feel physically sick, and I’ve failed completely in my few efforts to talk to GIZ members about what they do. I don’t think local lobbying is necessarily very useful because no-one working on the ground wants to even consider the possibility that what they are doing here in Uganda might be useless or harmful, and they don’t make many decisions about what they do. This kind of advocacy then needs to happen at a higher level. I understand EA is fairly active in Berlin, and this is the kind of thing that could well be lobbied on successfully.
  

• My experience here in Northern Uganda is that most climate mitigation funding is ineffectual, with a surprising amount of it just funnelled into corrupt official’s pockets and a lot of the rest spent on meaningless trainings and meetings. Like Stephen said much of it would be far better spent just on development initiatives—that will be better climate mitigation than the current useless projects. Redirecting he 100 billion of climate funding could be a GREAT area for advocacy, perhaps the most important at the moment. I might write a post on this even…
  

• I think a key factor to consider will be which governments might be willing to be nudged in the right direction. My instinct is that USAID might be a waste of time to lobby with their rigid policies more concerned with politics and accountability than impact (although they would claim otherwise), while you might be able to get more traction in European countries.

Can’t believe your Hans Neiman joke as well. About the most niche joke I’ve ever seen lol what percent of people here will get it haha love it!

Keen to discuss this more!

Oh this is such a lovely post. Thank you for the wonderful mix of data, anecdotes, pictures, and writing. In particular, the personalities of community members really shone through. Congratulations on all of your accomplishments so far, and best wishes for 2023!
Small thing: the table of “favourite community members” is displaying very tall and narrow for me.

Thanks for writing this post! Very interesting

Some of the winning entries from the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest have now been narrated:

• Are you really in a race? The cautionary tales of Szilárd and Ellsberg by Haydn Belfield

• Does economic growth meaningfully improve well-being? by Vadim Albinsky

• Effective altruism in the garden of ends by Tyler Alterman

• Notes on effective altruism by Michael Nielsen

• Biological Anchors external review by Jennifer Lin

You can listen via the [EA Forum Podcast](https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​K5Snxo5EhgmwJJjR2/​​announcing-audio-narrations-of-ea-forum-posts-1) or on the individual post pages themselves.

Great article but I think the baseline for comparisons should be based on how long a country has existed as an independent cohesive entity. Malawi has only been an independent state for 58 years so maybe the comparison should be done based on the level developed countries were at when they were at 58 years in modern times. I think if this was done Malawi may look a lot better. I’m skeptical that the process of nation building and developing national cohesion can be shortcut. I also think without such national cohesion it’s difficult for broad based economic growth to happen. It seems a lot of comparisons are made between countries in sub-Saharan Africa and countries that have existed in some form or another for centuries or where the populations have remained homogenous enough that there is not significant internal friction limiting economic activity. These 2 things are not true for most sub-Saharan countries where there is a lot of internal division. Many people if not most in these countries have more allegiance to their tribes than the state and this really affects how politics and governments are run. It also affects how resources are distributed and levels of trust in society. I’d guess that in my own country it will take maybe 2 to 3 generations of intermarriage and other societal processes for tribal lines to get sufficiently blurred such that the nation state becomes the preeminent identifying group for most people. I don’t find this depressing as it seems to be a process states have to go through. It would be absurd(in my view) to expect that a young child grow into a matured adult within say half the time it takes other children, similarly I think its kind of absurd to expect young countries that didn’t exist a century ago to become fledgling utopias within say 50 years.

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As an example of this dynamic he calls “early plasticity, later rigidity,” MacAskill asks us to consider the U.S. Constitution. It was written over 116 days, and amended eleven times in the first six years. But in the last fifty years, it’s only been amended once. I suspect that if we don’t make headway in ending factory farming soon, it’ll be not unlike many of the constitutional laws we find distasteful—seemingly impossible to overturn.

Are there many parts of the constitution that ‘we’, meaning people in general, find ‘distasteful’? My impression is that most of the constitution either has few critics, or, if it has many critics, also has many defenders, or the critics disagree about how to change it. If we were to write it from scratch today, we’d probably end up with something quite different in many respects, but that doesn’t mean there are massive generally agreed problems with it.

Wholesome and awesome and informative!

Just disagree with this :

“I do not consider myself a hardcore consequentialist. In general, I find it strange to believe that a single ethical theory could/​should possibly guide all aspects of one’s life.”

How is it difficult to believe that trying to promote good conscious experiences and minimize bad conscious experiences could be the key guide to one’s behavior? A lot of EAs, myself included, consider this to be the ultimate goal for our actions… Of course, we need many other areas of study and theory to guide in specific areas.

I understand that you disagree with hardcore consequentialism, but I don’t see why you think it is strange for others to adopt it. This is especially true when you acknowledge the complexity in consequentialist decision-making, as you did in this post.

“. I think it’s important that as many people as possible are empowered to participate in what could be humanity’s most important century. ”

Dear Stephan, it is not only that they can participate. Poor countries are less stable and can desestabilize others. Their population grows unsustainably and their demographic excedents can be destabilizing.

Growth is a moral imperative and part of the political stabilization that is necessary to avoid big power conflict and even nuclear war.

A Global Middle Class is a necessary condition for the reduction of geopolitical /​ nuclear risk. So growth is a long term target too. Of course, direct giving and charitable organizations are relatively impotent to create growth: research, technological transfers and political work to put development as a main global target is what can work here.

Happy to see that there’s a new org getting started in this area. If you can say, who are your initial funders?

One thing I’d like to see you grapple a bit more with is the politicization of official aid. This may seriously constrain an org’s ability to influence (1) top-down aid priorities and (2) in-country programme outcomes. This is based on my experience on the ground rather than a rigorous review, so may be wrong or biased in important ways. But it is my impression that official aid programmes are usually designed and implemented with much closer cooperation with and direction from the host government. I think this means that official aid orgs face more impact-political palatibility trade-offs than do NGOs, for example (though NGOs are constrained in other ways).

Another trend I think you should be aware of is the apparent pillaging of aid budgets to fund climate finance commitments. Rich countries have promised to finance projects in lower-income countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and pledged that they’ll do so by providing additional funding on top of their aid budgets. In reality, though, they’re falling well short of those taregets AND many are raising much of the climate finance money by reallocating their aid budgets!

I’d love to see more scrutiny on this decision—for example, some of the folks at CGD are doing God’s work by working through tedious aid budget details. It’s not at all clear that climate finance projects save more lives than traditional aid projects that are more optimized for health outcomes, so I think this trend is probably very bad compared to a counterfactual of just funding the regular aid budget (and almost certainly very bad against a counterfactual of aid funding + additional climate finance).

Co-founder of EA Forum podcast here. I wanted to say that I think this is great. As I’ve discussed in conversations with some of the OPs:

I just want there to be good audio content, which is why we started that podcast. I’m super happy that someone else is doing it, with professional skills and tools and that there are dedicated resources devoted to it. And it seems to be going very well!

As for the “EA Forum Podcast”

• I’d be happy to merge all of that content with this new initiative, ideally including the embedings (note, we generally put the ‘audio’ tag on posts we narrated)

  • acknowledging that our audio and narration quality is general a bit lower; but hopefully still useful - and I sometimes gave comments in my own narrations …

• Would be happy to semi-close that podcast and have it point here to avoid clutter and confusion, but Garret may have other ideas

Some suggestions for this podcast … possibly something we could top-up on “EA Forum Podcast”

• Comment threads: I’d really like to see at least some of these narrated. Much of the value for many posts is even greater in the threads then in the original post. And of course it’s valuable to hear what people think about a post’s ideas and credibility, and get these other perspectives.

• Author narration: I think this is often high value because it gives good insight into the tone and intentions of the writer. Of course this trades off with non-professional narration and not all authors having the audio tools. Still, it seems like something that I’d like to see happen more.

...

Congrats on a great launch. Really enjoying it and getting a lot out of it.

I attended EAGx Berkeley event on Dec 2, 2022. Previously I had engaged with EA by participating & later facilitating in Intro to EA Virtual programs, writing on this forum and attending the US Policy careers speaker series. All these previous engagements were virtual. This was the first time I was in a room full of EAs! I want to thank the organizers for giving me a travel grant for this event. It would have been impossible for me to attend this event without it.

It was a net positive experience for me. I had 4 goals in mind. 3 of them went much better than expected and 1 of them didn’t go as well. I explain my goals and how they went below. They are listed in priority:

1. Find an internship (especially in DC)

• When I applied to the event, this goal was Find an internship (anywhere) and it was 2nd priority. But I was getting closer to the final rounds of a fellowship program which was conditional on getting a DC internship. So, I increased priority before the conference.

• This goal didn’t go as well as I thought it would. Many orgs I spoke to didn’t have applications open. They just asked me to fill some sort of ‘general interest form’ on their website and told me when positions might open. I guess December is not really hiring season (at least for the orgs I was interested in)

1. Get advice on if I should stop at my Masters or go all the way to a PhD

• When I applied to the event, this goal was originally What after Masters and it was 3rd priority. But one of my profs at uni spoke with me to consider a PhD a week before the conference. So, it changed and got higher priority before the conference.

• I got some of the best advice on this. The 1-on-1 and office hours really helped me. Also, on day 1 of the conference Alex Lawsen spoke about An easy win for hard decisions.. So I ended up writing up a Google doc on this decision and sending it to many of the people I did 1-on-1s with. In addition, I attended a session on ‘Theory of Change’ by Michael Aird and it is going to play a huge role in how I finally make this decision.

1. Get advice on starting a student group

• This was actually priority 1 when I applied. But my cofounder also ended up getting selected for the event and since he could also talk about it with folks it made sense to push this down, given there were other goals that had to be prioritized as well.

• I got good suggestions for this. My cofounder spoke with Jessica Mccurdy. I spoke with another student group organizer who got me into the ‘EA Groups’ Slack channel.

1. Learn if there is any intersection between AI safety and policy

• I made up this goal on day 2 of the conference given the number of AI safety events that happened. That is why it is bottom priority.

• I learnt that the jargon here is “AI Governance”. I saw that many AI safety orgs didn’t really hire folks to do this (with notable exceptions). I hope to spend a few hours this winter break looking into this given that a few people told me that this is a fairly neglected area. If I find it really interesting, I might end up writing up something on the forum about this.

Other thoughts:

• Given that the FTX scandal happened recently, I was kind of worried the event would be all about that. I had read enough about it on social media and on the forum, felt bad for the people who got cheated, recognized what I can learn from it and by the time the conference rolled on I was over it. I didn’t want it to be stirred up all over again. So, I was glad to not be forced into any conversations about it. There were some events on the agenda on that topic but I was able to avoid them. So, discussions on this very important disaster did happen but it was out of the way for those who had worked through it which I really appreciated.

• I was generally encouraged and felt optimistic seeing a bunch of people who (are atleast trying to) care about the world. Some of them were eccentric, some of them were too gloomy (IMO) about x-risks but all were kind people.

• I personally felt that I was generally being too risk averse. Seeing people daring to try out of the ordinary stuff has helped me update a little bit more towards risk taking (of course keeping in mind to internalize risks to the max)

(I applied to EAIF about a week ago, didn’t hear back from them so far, but didn’t read this as unusual. It’s especially important for me to know if my grant will be approved during 2022. If someone has info on what my hopes there should be, that would help me)

Near-Term AI capabilities probably bring low-hanging fruits for global poverty/​health

I’m an alignment researcher, but I still think we should be vigilant about how models like GPT-N could potentially be used to make the world a better place. I like the work that Ought is doing with respect to the academic field (and, hopefully, alignment soon as well). However, my guess is that there are low-hanging fruits popping up because of this new technology, and the non-profit sector has yet to catch up.

This shortform is a Call To Action for any EA entrepreneur, you could potentially boost efficiency of the non-profit sector with the use of these tools. Of course, be careful since GPT-3 will hallucinate sometimes. But putting it in a larger system with checks and balances could 1) make non-profits save time and money 2) make previously inefficient or non-viable non-profits become a top charity.

I could be wrong about this, but my expectation is that there will be a lag between the time people can use GPT effectively for the non-profit sector and when they actually do.

Does EA Forum have a policy on sharing links to your own paywalled writing? E.g. I’ve shared link posts to my blog, and others have shared link posts to their substacks, but I haven’t see anyone share a link post to their own paid substack before.

I’ve been working with Deena for a little over a year now and I can personally attest to her being fantastic to work with. During that time I experimented with four other coaches/​consultants, and she’s the only one I’ve stuck with.

Main benefits of working with her:

• Practical intelligence and experience that’s sorely lacking in EA. While most EAs are talented at abstract ideas, we tend to be less experienced at hand-on implementation. Deena excels at this

• Inspiring and confidence-giving. If you suffer from impostor syndrome or anxiety, Deena is great to work with. I feel like whenever I’m facing a complex ball of ambiguity, a conversation with her will leave me feeling confident and knowing what to do next.

Excited to have EA UK join EA-DK as a group with the 4 letter acronym 😉

Thank you for putting this together Stephen. I am a facilitator for the Virtual Program and have been giving some thought to additional reading/​discussion groups to propose. It’s been my experience that the most impactful virtual groups provide access to good data along with opportunities to make personal/​emotional connections. I know very little about Malawi other than what I learned reading the youth edition of William Kamkwamba’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind with my children. Without other expertise, I can’t speak with authority about its value as an authentic representation of the true events, but I believe the book accessibly described some of the topics you illustrate here and I know of several universities that adopted it as required reading for all incoming students, so I would guess its an accurate telling. What are your thoughts about a group that reads the original book and supplemental content as a way of engaging with the growth and development situation in Malawi?

If there are others who would like to offer their thoughts for or against this idea, I would be happy to hear them. If this seems promising and anyone has ideas for helpful additional content, I would be happy to try to think some more about a proposal.

I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.

I elaborated on this in my shortform. If the suggestion above seems too vague, there’re also examples in the shortform. (I plan to coordinate a discussion/​brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests; please do PM me if you’re interested)

(I was late to the party, but since Nathan encourages late comments, I’m posting my suggestion anyways.)

Suggestion: I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.

I elaborated on this in my shortform. If the suggestion above seems too vague, there’re also examples in the shortform. (I plan to coordinate a discussion/​brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests; please do PM me if you’re interested)

(I was late to the party, but since Nathan encourages late comments, I’m posting my suggestion anyways. I’m posting the comment also under this post besides the previous one, because Nathan said that “maybe add them to both”; please correct me if that’s my misunderstanding)

Proposal: I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.

• My definition of epistemic health infrastructure: a social, digital, or organizational structure that regulates some aspect of the intellectual processes within the community, providing systematic safeguards against some epistemic health issues.

  • They can have different forms (social, digital, organizational, and more) or different focuses (individual epistemics, group epistemology, and more), but one thing that unites them is that they’re reliable structures and systems, rather than ad hoc patches.

We talk a lot about epistemic health, but has massively underinvested in infrastructure that safeguards epistemic health. While things like EA Forum and EAG and social circles at EA hubs are effective at spreading information and communicating ideas, to my knowledge there has been no systematic attempt at understanding (and subsequently improving) how they affect epistemic health.

Examples of things not-currently-existing that I consider epistemic health infrastructure:

• (Not saying that these are the most valuable ones; just that they fall into this category. They are examples and are only examples.)

• mechanisms to poll/​aggregate community opinions (e.g. a more systematized version of Nathan Young’s Polis polls) on all kinds of important topics, with reliable mechanisms to execute actions according to poll results

• something like the CEA community health team, but focusing on epistemic health, with better-defined duties and workflows, and with better transparency

• EA forum features and (sorting/​recommending/​etc.) algorithms aiming to minimize groupthink/​information cascades

• (Many proposals from other community members about improving community epistemic health also fall into this category. I won’t repeat them here.)

I plan to coordinate a discussion/​brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests. Please do PM me if you’re interested!

Great article, thanks! I will be sharing this with my reading group.

A couple of minor points:

• The text mentions a 6% growth spurt, but your graph says 8%

• It would be great to see the graph of Malawi’s GDP go back to 1961 (rather than 1990), since you mentioned the annual growth rate has averaged just 1.4% since then (I suspect this would better portray the disappointing lack of progress in the late 20th century, too)

Thanks for sharing Brian!

If you don’t mind, I’ll copy the two parts that stood out to me the most and helped to clarify the point for me better. If these points are valid, and I do think the logic makes sense, then this is quite concerning. Would love to hear other peoples thoughts on this.

And here’s the crux: If it (AGI) arrives, it may lock-in the values that exist at the time, including how we think about and treat animals on factory farms. This is because an AGI could be coded to reflect the preferences of the programmer—a potentially powerful individual or institution, since it’s unlikely this technology will emerge in a decentralized way given the capital and technical expertise required to build it—for the purpose of assisting them in achieving their and what they believe should be society’s goals, and one of those goals might be raising animals for food. What’s more, an AGI would be able to figure out how to farm animals in even more efficient ways, decreasing the cost of meat—which most people would celebrate—and increasing the profit margins of those who stand to benefit from this technology. No human would be more powerful than an AGI, so whatever force aims an AGI would have more power than any force that does not have that ability.

This value lock-in, combined with the fact that an AGI would not be hard to replicate, makes it such that the values encoded into the AGI could exist for as long as the universe can support life. As MacAskill writes, “There’s nothing different in principle between the software that encodes Pong and the software that encodes an AGI. Since that software can be copied with high fidelity, an AGI can survive changes in the hardware instantiating it. AGI agents are potentially immortal.”

We should change the longtermism pitch and make it more realistic for people who would otherwise be deterred. Avoid (at first) mentioning trillions of potential future people or even existential risks, and put more emphasis on how these risks (e.g. pandemics, nuclear wars, etc.) can affect actual people in our lifetime.

This post resonated with me, and I am very glad it was posted. I find it really disheartening that the last two posts on women’s experiences in EA have got sidetracked in the comments- this one has gotten sidetracked by discussion about Kathy Forth, and the last one got sidetracked by discussion about polyamory. Neither discussions have seemed to end up in suggestions that are going to be helpful to women. In my opinion, that would be a constructive outcome.

Importantly: I believe it would be incredibly valuable for EA to be seen as a place that is welcoming to women. I think EA is missing out on a huge pool of talent here, and on a huge pool of potential funders! I think people underestimate (1) the degree to which women are put off of EA via bad vibes on the internet (e.g. by scanning the comments on posts like these, and not seeing constructive suggestions to improve women’s experiences), and (2) the huge loss it is for EA to fail to attract more women. Are you funding constrained or talent constrained? Women have talent and money, and we’re (slightly) >50% of the population! I think that ‘bad vibes’ push a significant fraction of women away. In addition, I think it contributes to bad PR for EA in general.

I note that i don’t think it’s a good plan to rely on surveys of EA women (or anecdotes of ‘I am an EA woman and I haven’t had an issue’), because.… most women who sense ‘bad vibes’ in EA communities are not going to stick around to answer a survey. It’s an incredibly biased sample.

Things I would like to see (it’s possible that this is around somewhere and I haven’t found it). I focus mainly on the general issue of ‘how women are perceived and recruited in EA’ (rather than allegations of sexual assault), because I think is a really neglected issue:

1. Data to assess the extent of the problem (bearing in mind that we already have the somewhat alarming stat that only around 30% of EA are women):

• what proportion of senior positions at top EA orgs are occupied by men versus women? I suspect (but I could be wrong) that most of the positions are held by men.

• what proportion of talks at EAG are given by men versus women? Do less people attend the talks that are given by a woman or a man, and are people more or less likely to attend a 1 on 1 with a man or woman?

• do male sounding names get more karma/​ upvotes/​ comments on the EA forum?

• where do women ‘drop out’ on the EA pipeline? I’m assuming its initial recruitment, but idk. I think working this out is crucial towards increasing the number of women (and therefore to improving women’s experience more broadly- I believe this would likely flow naturally from achieving a more balanced gender ratio).

2. Some potential actions to make EA more welcoming to women:

• more women in top, leadership positions (and increasing the visibility of these women). I think this has huge benefit- it will make EA more welcoming to women in general, and I suspect that having broader viewpoints in general will also benefit EA.

• If the data suggests that women’s work/​ posts/​ talks achieve less social influence than men’s (this is my suspicion)- highlight women’s work so it doesn’t get drowned out

• doing best to achieve reasonable gender ratio in people giving talks at conferences, i assume this is done already though?

• potentially employing someone (with experience at a major org that is not EA) as an expert on this, this is hardly a problem that is unique to EA. They may have the fresh takes/​ outside opinion which would be helpful to EA .

This might be where I disagree with others, but I do not think that EA topics are inherently less attractive to women (compared to men), or that women are somehow inherently less skilled at pursuing EA topics. Instead, I am concerned that there is a real lack of deep and critical thought about why women get put off EA; i think the community is missing out on a huge untapped benefit here. I hope that we can apply the data-driven/​ research and analytical skills (what attracted me to EA in the first place) towards this issue.

(I also want to explicitly note that I think the work done by the community health team is excellent, and this post is not intended as a criticism to them. In addition, note that many of the points that I make here also apply to other communities that are under-represented in EA, even if I have focused upon women here).

Thanks for the post! You wrote,

You, a human, might object that you don’t like this so it can’t be universally true, yet a Babyeater would object that you not eating babies is an outrageous norm violation that will lead to terrible outcomes.

But in that case, the babyeater and I would argue over the specifics of the causality of violating the babyeater’s maxim.

In deciding between conflicting maxims, you can:

1. contextualize each maxim’s application.

2. If the contexts overlap, then elicit the universalizable consequences of the maxims. Otherwise, stop.

3. If each side agrees about the consequences, then compare the values each side uses to judge the consequences. Otherwise, stop.

In the end, I have found that either:

• the maxims applied in different contexts.

• at least one maxim is understood by the opposing side to have different consequences than the other side understands.

• the opposing sides had judged the same consequences with different values.

By comparing maxims on the basis of context, consequences, and values, you can get from some disagreement over maxims to any potential difference in values. The point is that values are not necessarily where the disagreement occurs.

Here’s what I usually try when I want to get the full text of an academic paper:

1. Search Sci-Hub. Give it the DOI (e.g. https://​​doi.org/​​...) and then, if that doesn’t work, give it a link to the paper’s page at an academic journal (e.g. https://​​www.sciencedirect.com/​​science...).

2. Search Google Scholar. I can often just search the paper’s name, and if I find it, there may be a link to the full paper (HTML or PDF) on the right of the search result. The linked paper is sometimes not the exact version of the paper I am after—for example, it may be a manuscript version instead of the accepted journal version—but in my experience this is usually fine.

3. Search the web for "name of paper in quotes" filetype:pdf. If that fails, search for "name of paper in quotes" and look at a few of the results if they seem promising. (Again, I may find a different version of the paper than the one I was looking for, which is usually but not always fine.)

4. Check the paper’s authors’ personal websites for the paper. Many researchers keep an up-to-date list of their papers with links to full versions.

5. Email an author to politely ask for a copy. Researchers spend a lot of time on their research and are usually happy to learn that somebody is eager to read it.

Really weird to group together Gebru and Torres.

A stronger, more deliberate push (backed by funding) should be made to enter professional places (by opening professional groups) and attract mid-to-late-stage professionals from diverse industries, as well as people in countries where EA has no presence. A lesser imperative should be placed on university groups.

Feedback on the questions: I think the wording is too strong sometimes. I.e. the question “want the EA community to look very different as a result of this crisis.“ or spend significant time ect. This effectively compresses the scale for me, not wanting to choose the one or two most extreme choices.

More outside expertise should be welcomed. All roles in EA organizations should be advertised on open platforms like LinkedIn, and while selecting based on “culture fit” is allowed, people without previous EA exposure should not be disqualified outright.

There should be a separate body to represent communities which is a combination of elected and randomly assigned members. Its purpose is to have a check on the un-elected experts in other organizations while being kept in check by them in turn.

Many EA organizations currently make decisions based on a western-centric (for lack of a better word) mindset, accidentally silencing voices coming from outside. More EAGs/​job opportunities should be held outside of USA/​UK/​EU since third-world countries have a hard time getting a Visa for developed countries.

Remarkable interview. One key section (people should read the whole thing!):

When you talk about your mistakes, you talk about your intent. Your mother once described you as a “take-no-prisoners utilitarian.” Shouldn’t your intent be irrelevant?

Except to the extent that it’s predictive of the future. But yeah, at the end of the day, I do think that, what happened happened, and whatever I was thinking or not thinking or trying to do or not trying to do, it happened. And that sucks. That’s really bad. A lot of people got hurt. And I think that, thinking about why it happened, there are some perspectives from which it matters, including trying to figure out what to do going forward. But that doesn’t change the fact that it happened. And as you said, I’m not expecting people to say, Oh, that’s all good then. Sam didn’t intend for me to lose money. I don’t miss that money anymore. That’s not how it works.

One of your close personal mentors, the effective altruism philosopher Will MacAskill, has disavowed you. Have you talked with him since?

I haven’t talked with him. [Five second pause.] I don’t blame him. [20-second pause and false starts.] I feel incredibly bad about the impact of this on E.A. and on him, and more generally on all of the things I had been wanting to support. At the end of the day, this isn’t any of their faults.

This fucked up a lot of their plans, and a lot of plans that people had to do a lot of good for the world. And that’s terrible. And to your point, from a consequentialist perspective, what happened was really bad. And independent of intent or of anything like that, it’s still really bad.

Have you talked with your brother Gabe, who ran your Guarding Against Pandemics group? Are you worried, frankly, that you might have ruined his career too?

It doesn’t feel good either. Like, none of these things feel good.

Have you apologized to him?

Yeah, I spent a lot of last month apologizing, but I don’t know how much the apologies mean to people at the end of the day. Because what happened happened, and it’s cold comfort in a lot of ways.

I don’t want to put words in his mouth. I feel terrible about what happened to all the things he’s trying to do. He’s family, and he’s been supportive even when he didn’t have to be. But I don’t know what’s going through his head from his perspective, and I don’t want to put words in it.

Do you think someone like you deserves to go to jail? On a moral level, doesn’t someone who has inflicted so much pain—intent be damned—deserve it? There are a lot of people incarcerated in this country for far less.

What happens happens. That’s not up to me.

I can tell you what I think personally, viscerally, and morally feels right to me. Which is that I feel like I have a duty to sort of spend the rest of my life doing what I can to try and make things right as I can.

You shocked a lot of people when you referred in a recent interview to the “dumb game that we woke Westerners play.” My understanding is that you were talking about corporate social responsibility and E.S.G., not about effective altruism, right?

That’s right.

To what extent do you feel your image and donations gave you cover? I know you say you didn’t do anything wrong intentionally. But I wonder how much you were in on the joke.

Gave me cover to do what, though? I think what I was in on, so to speak, was that a lot of the C.S.R. stuff was bullshit. Half of that was always just branding, and I think that’s true for most companies. And to some extent everyone knew, but it was a game everyone played together. And it’s a dumb game.

This is an initial call for people, once we get a beginning team to write it then we will post a better description. :)

This is a really impressive endeavor. I want to flag an important argument that I think is quite important for EAs to take away.

We are familiar with the idea of some interventions having more leverage than others and thus being better. For example, Open Philanthropy does global aid advocacy as a cause area because every dollar they spend on advocacy can increase aid spending by much more than $1. But livelihood interventions point to a different source of leverage: the private market. Market failures are everywhere in developing countries—frictions that prevent mutually beneficial market transactions. Thus, correcting those market failures can unlock transactions that increase incomes by much more than the actual money spent. The success of each of these interventions reflects a corresponding market failure that they are solving: for example, Building Markets is impactful because SMEs in poor countries and buyers in rich countries can’t find each other to make mutually beneficial transactions.

For a long time, EA’s favored approach to development interventions was to focus singlemindedly on health because health impacts are large and direct. I think it’s a good thing that we are now recognizing that there are so many indirect interventions that have much higher leverage. Solving frictions that prevent mutually beneficial market transactions—whether in labor markets or export markets—deserves a lot more attention as a class of interventions.

Well, this is very interesting! Thank you for posting it.

My first impression, reading it, is that I wonder where most of your hard numbers come from. While the references to organizations or research sources are scattered, did I miss a summary of what organizations provided numbers or data on topics like:

• projected anthropogenic GHG’s

• total carbon uptake by trees (for example, respiration increases, tree types)

• threats to aforestation vs reforestation efforts

• policies of native vs non-native reforestation

• mitigation of climate impacts on forests

• ecosystem management to avoid increasing niche species losses

I also wonder how estimates were done of effects on trees of climate impacts like:

• drought

• tree diseases

• fires

• invasive pests

• development priorities

• increasing tree respiration

These effects impact reforestation and aforestation efforts.

For me it’s a warning that your analysis must be broad but shallow because an analysis of, for example, ecosystem services will necessarily be very complicated with respect to aforestation vs reforestation and choice of plant species and impacts on insect species, and related problems with tree-destroying pests. That research is still ongoing. In your write-up here, I don’t see direct references to IPCC data or projections about value and impacts of land management. Is that represented here, earlier in your chain of research, or in your sources? They’re one of several options for research summaries in this area.

I did take a look at the www.evsd.info database, briefly, and it reads to me as economics thinking applied to ecology, and not very well. For example, their homepage lists one of the primary “ecosystem services” of mangroves as tourism. That might be true subjectively and in the moment, where there is some choice about whether the mangrove forests exist and how important tourism should be to an economy, but it fails to recognize mangrove forest role in contexts where earnings from tourism are irrelevant. Fundamentally, this looks like more dissonance between what motivates policy action and what deserves policy action.

With nature, you can’t typically change your mind. Larger systems can be hard to restore. Conditions won’t allow growth of species in the right quantities or varieties or at all. Animal and plant species, once extinct, tend to stay gone. You can’t remove toxins from soil or water or air in polluted areas. You can’t control the temperature or the weather,. You can’t grow food where you once could, or eat it when you once could, because its no longer safe. Without the economic incentive, and narrow interests define those, survival value of ecosystems are mismanaged. Once the land is depleted, it typically goes ignored. Until then, it’s dollar value is relative to current economic activity that is falsely projected to continue into the future, something like tourism. What if tourism has to stop to create enough benefit to save some niche ecosystem feature?

On my reading, this idea of ecosystem services given dollar amounts treats the value of ecosystems as one of aesthetics if the ecosystem has not otherwise been exploited for profit in some easily recognizable business process (and plausibly a non-reversible one that degrades the ecosystem). However, the real value of these systems is not aesthetic. They are survival-supporting machines that we don’t understand well and interact with poorly. If we thought of them like that, the real question here, of how to protect whole ecosystems from our misdoings, would be the focus.

In your existential risk mitigation footnote, you mention that you make existential risk directly proportional to GAST reduction, but it is not. In particular, some temperature effects can happen with small additional increases in temperature, thus why they are called tipping points, because their effects proceed with just a small additional forcing. Furthermore, some tipping element effects involve a hysteresis relationship, so that just reversing the GAST increase that caused them will not reverse their change (for example, sea level rise). Finally, some tipping elements can change in a reversible way, but the reversal over the change is longer than human time frames.

Underlying your approach could be an assumption that, having defeated climate change, the natural world is saved, so it makes sense to compare tree planting as an approach to reducing GAST rise with some other approach. However, the sharp losses to all tree populations due to existing climate change at some intermediate point in the future (for example, tipping of the Amazon within 20 years) is a near term threat to our ecosystems even if GHG’s were in principle reducible to pre-industrial levels by century’s end, other things equal. Not to mention, other things are not equal. In particular, with increase in GAST past 1.5C virtually guaranteed, we can expect tipping points to pass this century.

Ecosystem losses are covered somewhat in the IPCC report on land management, but not to the reducible form where you can assume incremental changes lead to incremental effects. More broadly, the problem is one of assuming that ecosystem management is like running a factory, that is, we are deciding how to allocate resources and make products (in a broad sense), and can always change our minds, reallocate resources, bring in engineers, install new stuff, and go back to make the older products. But we can’t do that, really. Once a system is too far gone, it won’t make sense to try and recover. I don’t think that danger or cost or timing of such outcomes is represented in your analysis.

So, yes, tree planting is not justifiable as a single solution for climate change, but in fact tree populations are threatened by climate change. To model reforestation or ecosystem protection efforts as a question of cost-effectiveness in reducing GHG’s reverses the causality. The bigger concern is whether we can protect forests by reducing anthropogenic GHG’s, real-estate development, cattle-raising, and other pressures on forest health. Forests are important in their own right, but that importance should not be reduced to economic value in a way that ignores most ecosystem survival benefits and limits.

I welcome your thoughts. Thanks.