What do AI risks, pandemics, and animal welfare have in common? They’re all in my quizzes! Test your knowledge on global health, animal welfare, and existential risks at Quizmanity. Who knew saving the world could be as simple as acing a quiz?
AndreFerretti
I recently published six new wikiHow articles to promote EA principles: How to Make a Difference in Your Career, How to Help Farmed Animals, How to Launch a High Impact Nonprofit, How to Reduce Animal Cruelty in Your Diet, How to Help Save a Child’s Life with a Malaria Bed Net Donation, and How to Donate Cryptocurrency to Effective Charities.
Some titles might change soon in case you can’t find them anymore (e.g., How to Reduce Animal Cruelty in Your Diet --> How to Have a More Ethical Diet Towards Animals, and How to Help Save a Child’s Life with a Malaria Bed Net Donation --> How to Help Save a Child’s Life from Malaria).
Three more are in the approval process (you have to wait a few days before seeing them): How to Fight Climate Climate Change by Donating to the Best Charities, How to Donate to the Most Effective Animal Welfare Charities, and How to Help the World’s Poorest People by Sending Money. I will publish some more articles in the following weeks.
Let me know if you have feedback on the articles, and I’ll be glad to improve them :)
Also, thank you for writing this shortform, as it inspired my mentor Cillian Crosson to ask me about writing these wikiHows :)
Best,
André
Warren Buffett called his private jet ‘The Indefensible’ — then renamed it ‘The Indispensable’ after realizing it was worth the money.
Source
Thanks for the post! Absorbency could be a 4th factor in the ITN framework for comparing career options. I’m curious about how 80,000 Hours considers absorbency in their list of top-recommended career paths.
I didn’t know fish had 10M neurons. Thanks!
I appreciate your quantitative thinking. But I believe it’s unfair to say that a fish is 10,000X worth less than a human because a fish has fewer neurons. What if suffering has a minimum threshold of neurons and then declining marginal suffering after that? We don’t know (as you point out in your last paragraph).
“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.”
—Einstein
“A life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.”
—Charlie MungerThis post deserves 10X the amount of karma, congrats!
My takeaways:
-check the Nonlinear Library podcasts
-Intuition Flooding: read a bunch of examples to grasp a concept
-Spot the Core: summarise to learn, as in this comment :)
-Active recall doubles retention rateI’m a big fan of learning. I have 7,000 Anki flashcards, read 150 books in 2019, and write on my website to learn what I write. Yet I learnt something from this post, thanks!
I used Notion, but I prefer Obsidian. It stores notes as plain-text files so they last forever. I recommend it.
Small slip: “Image from the Farnham Street blog” (it’s Farnam) in both images.
I was extremely excited to learn how advanced GPT-3 is. The feeling I have is of infinite potential, like I could interact with it for days if not months, and learn more and more.
I was really impressed with how quickly GPT-3 could produce results. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of what it is capable of.
Normally, I read articles on AI and think ” it’s in the future and doesn’t really matter to me now”. GPT-3 showed me that the future is already here and more advanced than expected!
Normally, it takes me roughly a week to publish a blog article. With GPT-3, I was able to publish 7 articles in 3 days. I was more excited and most of the GPT-3 articles were short, so these figures are not comparable. But you get the point.
[One of these paragraphs was written by GPT-3] ;)
Thanks for the analysis! After listening to many students: what would you do as Superman in 24h?
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
-NietzscheThank you for showing us your why. You inspire others to live meaningful lives.
I’m curious how EA as a central purpose influenced your life. Which big decision did you make differently?
Thank you for your response, Peter. Though I was overly dramatic, the point was that cancel culture harms freedom of speech, without which there is no scientific progress or democracy. Burner accounts may be a symptom of this.
Yes it is! I also mentioned it in the post :)
You’ve probably already seen it but linking it just in case: the Future Perfect 50
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23399287/future-perfect-50-change-agents#package-toc
I’ve set up a Manifold market for each of the 12 policy ideas discussed in the post, thanks to Michael Chen’s idea (Manifold uses collective wisdom to estimate the likelihood of events). You can visit the markets here and bet on whether the US will adopt these ideas by 2028. So go ahead and place your bets, because who said politics can’t be a bit of a gamble?
“a white-collar worker alone in an office, 3 monitors full of text, a Great Wave Off Kanagawa crashes against the window, raining inside, extreme detail, bright and vibrant colours—v 4 --ar 3:2”
This was one of my first images on Midjourney, now my prompts are much simpler :)
Makes sense, thanks for your comment. You made me think that I should be more careful about the terms I use, and argue more from first principles. I’ll try doing this here:
I’m concerned about the growing trend of people and social-media platforms suppressing opposing opinions. I would love a world where people are free to speak their minds without fear of cancellation. If Big Tech and the government dictate what can and cannot be said, then everyone says the same things to avoid the risk of being banned from online platforms. To advance science and maintain freedom, you need to let people express innovative and unconventional ideas, which seem crazy at first and require free speech.
What a beautiful project for Open Philanthropy to sponsor! I was so happy to see my favourite YouTube channel publish this video :)
EA has too few grantmaking organizations, and there’s a big gap in small-scale funding. The program’s impact can be tremendous.
I’m excited to see the pilot results and learn the grantmaking tools, frameworks, and examples that you will share.
P.S. The five available positions you list at the end of the post are expired. I would remove them.
Thanks for the insights! While reading your post, I noticed a lack of a summary — so I’ve distilled your key findings below. Feel free to add it to the original post if useful.
Unofficial Executive Summary
Clearer Thinking ran a study on 500 people exploring the relationship between anxiety and depression, which have a surprisingly high correlation (r=0.82). In short, anxiety reflects worry about potential future adversities, while depression is the feeling of not being able to experience a positive, meaningful life.
Despite these differences, anxiety and depression share many symptoms — including difficulties with sleep, fatigue, irritability, and concentration — although with subtle variations. The authors created an infographic that maps common thought patterns like “I have a low opinion of myself” to anxiety, depression, or both. Additionally, they designed another graphic linking cognitive distortions, such as catastrophizing, to the two conditions.
Thanks for evaluating the evaluators!
Hi Bara, thank you very much for your feedback!
Thanks for the catch on the malaria bed net :)
I think cancer deaths have been going up, not down (https://ourworldindata.org/cancer#is-the-world-making-progress-against-cancer), so maybe you meant 4M not 40M in 2015.
I don’t fully understand the problem with the ‘payload’ point, but since I’m in doubt, and I understand that it could be a risk, I will remove it for the moment.
TL;DR Write shorter posts.