Benevolent_Rain

• Benevolent_Rain 11 Aug 2026 3:12 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: James Brobin’s comment on: We don’t know how con­cerned ex­perts are about en­g­ineered pandemics

  1 - I think it is good to be sceptical about this. I guess you’ve read about Pascal’s mugging and other related topics. I am happy you keep this debate alive as it’s not really settled.
  
  2 - Yeah look at mirror bacteria, which is just one example of engineered, environment-to-human threats (air turning toxic)
  
  3 - I think this is a useful intuition, but it also has limits. That said, there are step changes in history, such as powered flight invented only after thousands of years of longing and attempts by humans. This is about step changes in technology. If you believe DNA is the code of life, it is not a large leap to believe we can create really bad stuff. And it has happened before, like the great oxygenation event that ~killed all previous biological life on earth.

  But basically, please be skeptical—it is super healthy!

• Benevolent_Rain 10 Aug 2026 3:53 UTC

  2 points

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  on: We don’t know how con­cerned ex­perts are about en­g­ineered pandemics

  Hi! What do you think about x-risk cause prioritization showing that regardless of whether the chance of a pandemic is 0.1% or 10%, the enormous size of the future makes this worthwhile anyway, especially given tractable solutions? Asking as I think the crux for working on biosec is less about how likely something is to happen, than what might happen. I am really happy with the recent clarification on E2H, but still feel like the low protection needed is under explained, meaning I think the lowest confidence from my point of view is whether current plans builds sufficient protection. That said, I would agree with “we don’t know what protection level is required, but let’s start building what we can, some protection is better than none”.

• Benevolent_Rain 1 Jul 2026 8:33 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: Ulrik Horn’s Quick takes

  Halycon too I realized.

• Benevolent_Rain 28 Jun 2026 8:28 UTC

  21 points

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  on: Ulrik Horn’s Quick takes

  Please list any new funding opportunities you can think of here on the Forum? I feel like we might already be in the early ramp-up to significantly more EA aligned funding. At the same time, the Forum’s overview over funding opportunities feels like it is quickly getting outdated. I think as things move quickly, coordination might become looser and new promising interventions are identified, it is helpful for people to have a good overview over available funding sources and their priorities.

  I have heard on the grapevine there is already funding on several fronts that might not be very public. I am a little bit uncertain if perhaps it is better these sources remain anonymous. At the same time, I think there might be several promising EA projects that are not sufficiently visible to people influencing funding decisions.

  Epistemic note: I am not listing these yet as I have not had time yet to verify how much they qualify as EA funding opportunities.

  Here are a few recent developments I am considering listing on the funding opportunities page, but would like someone that knows these funds better to list them:

  • Probably several I have missed—please list these here

  • OpenAI Foundation—AI Resilience

  • OpenAI Rosalind

  • The Launch Sequence (not a fund in itself, but plausibly one can treat this kind of like a funding source?)

  • Several of Renaissance Philanthropy’s (RP) funds (several quite plugged in EAs do not even know of RP!)

  • Astralis Foundation

• Benevolent_Rain 3 Jun 2026 11:51 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Why we’re launch­ing the Fron­tier Biodefense Fellowship

  Would those who disagree or down vote this and Tobias’ previous post please provide some more information? I realize you might want to remain anonymous, so perhaps please just agree vote on this comment if you think someone should copy paste the the reasons for disagreement or downvotes from my previous post on biodefense that also received useful criticism.

• Benevolent_Rain 3 Jun 2026 10:44 UTC

  10 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: My dis­agree­ments with CEA’s ap­proach to stew­ard­ing EA

  Is it dying though? Maybe I have some filter I forgot to turn off but on new and upvoted posts, 5 out of the 6 highest karma ones are about EA criticism (including this one!) as well as global health and animal welfare. Anecdotal, but perhaps hopeful? Maybe there is more diversity and epistemic humility than we get from the podcasts and other sources biased towards funder priorities? If that is true, how can we stay in touch with this? It feels kind of like regular news media dominated by wars and accidents while the world is also amazing and getting better.

  

• Benevolent_Rain 3 Jun 2026 4:41 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: My dis­agree­ments with CEA’s ap­proach to stew­ard­ing EA

  There is a possibly optimistic outcome here: That some significant portion of future donations will be put towards epistemic cultivation, criticism and diversity of thought in EA. In a sense, I think the Survival and Flourishing ecosystem is already spearheading interesting directions here, with a focus on AI epistemic tooling. Hopefully more will follow in diverse but similar directions, also looking to serve the EA community, or the questions we used to ask.

• Benevolent_Rain 2 Jun 2026 5:09 UTC

  2 points

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  on: My EA Story in brief plus some com­ments on EA

  Chakras sound pretty theistic lol. But love this piece. On projecting neuroses—do you think a ~playful attitude might help? While still being serious about producing good work (I guess serious about playing?), but maybe a bit more “detached” or “integrated” (I don’t know if play means more or less integration personally). Also thinking play and scout mindset (perhaps collaboration too) might go together—kids usually seem less willing to die on an idealistic hill than adults.

• Benevolent_Rain 1 Jun 2026 12:06 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Ulrik Horn’s Quick takes

  Was at EAG, “no seats left” on all AI talks, “57 seats left” on the biosec ones. Fully agree with others that biosec field building seems underserved. Anecdotal but perhaps illustrative. Thanks CEA for another event full of amazing people.

There May Be Pow­er­ful AI Safety Lev­ers in the En­ergy Sector

• Benevolent_Rain 28 May 2026 8:11 UTC

  5 points

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  on: Donat­ing 80% While It Still Counts

  I’m interested in advice on retirement savings—mine are far smaller than Jeff’s and reading this gives me slight anxiety haha. It would be action-guiding for me as maybe I should just not push myself to donate more and instead have a more solid retirement plan. Kudos to you Jeff on being transparent and generous!

• Benevolent_Rain 27 May 2026 8:28 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: AI en­ergy fore­casts may be miss­ing large-scale in­fer­ence demand

  Thanks so much Mo! I am tempted to make the following updates already—does this seem roughly right? Or is this still too high?

  1. Token usage at 8 hrs centered on 5M tokens, with an upper limit closer to 100M. The reasoning for the

     1. Upper range of 100M being that more complex tasks (assuming those from the study you quoted were low hanging fruits) might push this higher (as indicated by the compiler example), while

     2. efficiency gains might push lower, it already seems that from METR’s GPT-5.1-Codex-Max work <6 months ago it might, and this is very, very crude, be going lower.

  2. Token price centered at $1 per million tokens, instead of $5. I could make this even lower as $1 might show a downward trend, but at the same time this low price seems more to be due to cache tokens which I had ignored in my analysis—the input and output tokens still seem priced at roughly the price I found

  At the same time, I also feel like these numbers might still be too high—especially token price. The reason is that the super helpful links you sent point at pretty steep downward trends on token cost and point well taken on cache tokens being much cheaper.

AI en­ergy fore­casts may be miss­ing large-scale in­fer­ence demand

• Benevolent_Rain 23 May 2026 11:11 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Aviel Parrack’s comment on: Will we re­ally put data cen­ters in space?

  Sent draft on DM—I prefer to keep this non-public both because my employer needs to review this before it goes out and also because I would like a few people to find my biggest errors before I put it out there. But I aim to get this posted publicly in the next couple of weeks. Thanks!

• Benevolent_Rain 23 May 2026 10:59 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Aviel Parrack’s comment on: Will we re­ally put data cen­ters in space?

  I mean if you can move DCs and production/​mining/​etc. to space that’s a solid win for AI safety? We then basically delineate AI and the only human-inhabitable planet we know about. That’s a heavy lift though, but maybe water on that one moon of Uranus (?) and other parts could be assembled off-Earth. This is literally galaxy brain thinking but something I feel might be worth pursuing, or at least showing AIs that it might be cheaper for them to pursue off-Earth living than engage in uncertain and high-cost conflicts on Earth. Maybe they don’t care about time, and would be happy to build towards this over the next 1000 years instead of spending valuable compute and industrial capacity to prepare for AI-human conflict.

• Benevolent_Rain 23 May 2026 3:43 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 1

  on: Will we re­ally put data cen­ters in space?

  I have looked into AI and energy (happy to share my drafts with anyone interested). My impression is that it is not the cost of energy that drives orbital DCs, but instead the availability. It is not only orbital DCs that are being considered, the portfolio includes hopelessly naive stuff like floating DCs powered by ocean waves, restarting Three Mile Island, SMRs and much more. If energy consumed by human-equivalent AI task performed does not drastically reduce, the inference energy demands will far outstrip even the most electrical generation the world as a whole has ever added in a single year, even at low labor replacement rates. If anyone is working or thinking about this I am super interested in talking. I am hoping to publish my initial thoughts soon. The upshot: As with compute, if energy becomes a limiting factor, it might be a good point for interventions. For example, electricity regulating authorities (there are many and strong ones!) can incentivize disclosure of model capabilities in e.g. cyber, which is extremely relevant to cyber attacks on the electric grid and thus plausibly lands under their jurisdiction.

Why I won’t wait for my dream EA role

• Benevolent_Rain 21 May 2026 6:02 UTC

  53 points

  16 ∶ 0

  on: Ulrik Horn’s Quick takes

  I now think principles-first EA is more important than I previously thought because it helps prevent effectiveness drift. My anecdotal evidence from AI Safety and especially biosecurity gives me the impression that without constant anchoring to EA and especially comparisons to the clear ToCs and tractability for e.g. AMF, it is easy to lose focus on the high demands of choosing x-risk as a cause area over others. I previously placed less value on having strong links between EA and the various cause areas but now think I should update to thinking strong, continuous engagement with EA is important to keep one’s focus on each intervention’s cause prioritization assumptions that make it comparable to e.g. AMF or cage free chicken campaigns. This is not to say that causes such as AI Safety and biosec are not important, but that unless constantly tied back to EA cause prioritization, there is risk of drifting away from what made the cause look good in the first place. An example from biosecurity is the very easy slippage away from human extinction scenarios to ones where nearly everone dies (the difference being a crux as it is the potentially enormous future one is saving, not the people living at the time of the catastrophe). That said, it is completely fine and commendable that there is AI Safety and biosecurity work that does not target existential threats, but for EAs such changes in the nature of the work means they should consider changing their career. I think this is also important for newcomers to EA: For those of us who were around when we discussed whether x-risks demanded attention we might take concepts such as Pascal’s Mugging as obvious, but for newcomers it is important to engage with such concepts. Another observation I have made is that in animal welfare and global health one is constantly reminded by metrics of suffering alleviated per dollar, but such recurring reminders are lacking in x-risk focused cause areas.

• Benevolent_Rain 20 May 2026 4:24 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: Why are longter­mists so much less fo­cused on hu­man ex­tinc­tion these days?

  I am really happy you are focusing squarely on existential risk from bio. I think there is a tendency in EA-adjacent biosec work to lose a bit of focus on how extremely bad such scenarios are. I also think it is great you raised this Michelle—I also feel like not enough EAs have contemplated the importance of 2 further assumptions needed to work on longtermism:

  1 - Massive increase in value in the future (re: Arepo’s billions of star civilization), and
  2 - Very few or not other periods of existential risk for the rest of the infinite future

• Benevolent_Rain 18 May 2026 15:58 UTC

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: 10 big pro­jects for re­duc­ing bio x-risk

  Sure — I may be mixing abstractions here, so let me spell out what I had in mind.

  A 1000× reduction means that, in expectation, the protected environment has 1/​1000 of the relevant airborne particle concentration compared with the outside environment. So if an unprotected person would inhale 1000 relevant particles over some period, a protected person would inhale about 1 over the same period, ignoring spatial variation, time dynamics, leakage events, deposition, behavior, etc.

  My intuition was then: if the minimum infectious/​lethal dose were effectively 1 particle, and if we wanted lifetime infection/​death risk inside the protected space to be below ~1%, then the protected person’s expected inhaled dose would need to be on the order of <0.01 infectious particles over the relevant period. With only a 1000× reduction, that corresponds to an outside unprotected expected inhaled dose of only ~10 infectious particles over that same period.

  That seems surprisingly low compared to my own work on mirror bacteria. So I was wondering whether the 1000× target assumes one or more of the following:

  1. the relevant environmental concentrations are expected to be quite low;

  2. the true infectious/​lethal dose is meaningfully above 1 particle;

  3. the 1000× PM10 reduction is only one layer, with additional reductions from UV, glycol vapor, surface controls, masks, behavior, etc.;

  4. the target is meant as a practical near-term benchmark rather than a complete risk-reduction target.

  So my question is basically: what outside concentration /​ dose /​ acceptable-risk model makes 1000× the right threshold?