Former CTO and co-founder of earn-to-give fintech Mast.
Henry Stanley šø
Karma: 1,901
Looks like the linked post has been removed
Is it just me or is the post itself not showing here?
A fantastically inspiring story and a super interesting takeāsounds like Wasoko was a lot of hard graft. Well done for sticking with it for 11 years. I also see youāve pledged 70% of the proceeds with Founders Pledge; also extremely cool.
(Makes my B2B SaaS founding to give efforts seem much less Herculean in comparison!)
Great post!
we already had multiple strong studies showing that the availability of equivalent substitutes does not lead to major changes in meat consumption.
This feels like your weakest argument. So far there arenāt āequivalent substitutesā to meatāonly plant based imitationsāso itās not clear what these studies are telling us. The RP study you link to explicitly says itās an analysis of plant-based meats and not cultured meat.
Katjaās blogging from Inkhaven too!
Can you say more on why the first $40M is the only money moving the needle? I think very little funding goes on diet change (at least in the EA animal welfare world it feels like itās barely a focus these days) and much more on corporate campaigning, lobbying, legal action, innovations in farmed animal welfare technology etc.
April Foolās isnāt for a couple more weeks
Thank you for your service š«”
The BCC has been hard to get more traction on and probably requires mobilization on a larger scale than we currently have.
Could you give more detail on this?
I donāt see any mention here or in the comments about neglectedness, which seems like the most obvious reason for why EA isnāt a good fit here. There are enormous, well-funded, long-established ecosystems dedicated to exactly this sort of thingācivil liberties organisations, legal defence funds, democratic governance NGOs, journalism, academic institutions, unions, anti-fascist networks etc.
I think thereās some argument that the EA mindset could be applied to finding tractable interventions here but ultimately I just think there are more pressing problems that need our attention.
An analogy I read on Substack: if an epidural manufacturer told a government hospital āyouāre welcome to use our drug so long as you donāt use it in any abortions,ā it would probably be prudent to decline that contract (too much overhead).
This is a great intuition pump.
CEA was aware it was shared with people outside of HR by Riley, even if they themselves did not share it outside HR.
And it seems then like any confidentiality obligation on HR is expunged, given that this Riley shared the document themselves. Or at the very least thereās no case for them failing to act because of the need to keep the document/āits author confidential, as they had already shared it widely.
Donāt have much to add except that this sounds exceptionally fucked-up and Iām sorry you had to go through it.
I once had a conversation with a friend who felt that Anthropic advancing the AI frontier (despite their explicit commitment not to) was fine because theyāre āleading from the frontā in terms of their ethical stance.
It seems like that might not actually work? Advancing the frontier presumably encourages other labs to competeāand if those labs donāt have the same ethical strictures then leading from the front has no effect except to have moved the frontier forward faster than it would have otherwiseā¦
(Referencing OpenAIās deal with the Pentagon announced shortly after the Anthropic sanctions)
I donāt think this is meaningfully different from previous admins (not sure about autonomous weapons but certainly mass surveillance of Americans at home has been going on since the 2010s).
Broadly agree but:
The current problem is the lack of good training programs in impact-focused thinking, so itās hard for people with tons of experience and great credentials to get to the required EA-ness stage (impact-focused mindset, landscape familiarity) quickly enough to get the positions on offer, when they join EA.
Arenāt we mitigating this with things like MATS and BlueDot et al? These should be producing useful hires at a high rate so training isnāt the issue it seems
Let me write something up and come back to you.
Broadly in order of safety itās probably caffeine > modafinil > amphetamines (Vyvanse, Ritalin, Concerta, dexamphatamine etc). But amphetamines are very commonly prescribed for ADHD/ānarcolepsy (usually with an ECG and occasional blood pressure checks). I think the risk-reward works out very much positively but obviously Iām eliding a lot of detail.
Great post. Two things come to mind:
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One way to just be able to do more stuff is to take stimulants. I think there are cases where being on them can dent your intelligence in some subtle ways but broadly they can drastically increase your ability to do more, work through when youāre fatigued, etc. Maybe itās still a sufficiently edgy position that you donāt mentioned it here but the absence was interesting. People at college are all taking modafinil for a reason.
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I worry that some incredibly ambitious people in the EA world have gone on to pursue paths that have actually been harmful. Early employees at the frontier AI labs seem like the obvious exampleāAnthropic was founded as an āAI safety labā with commitments not to push the frontier but they obviously forgot about that along the way, and it seems hard to justify continuing to work there on capabilities imo. I suspect thereās a lot of motivated reasoning going on among this group. Perhaps itās a cautionary tale about ambition unmoored from reflection as other people point out here, or that if your ambition leads to filthy lucre then itās very hard to course correct later on.
(Agree with the other commenters here that maybe the rate-limiting step isnāt just pushing harder but co-ordination, taking more individual risks, etc)
reposted from my comment on the original Substack article
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Is there a risk of boiling the ocean here?
The ācommunity notes everywhereā proposal seems easy enough to build (Iāve been hacking away at a Chrome extension version of it). Iām not sure it makes sense to wait for personal computing to change fundamentally before trying to attempt this.
I agree that distribution is an issue, which Iām not sure how to solve. One approach might be to have a core group of users onboarded who annotate a specific subset of pagesālike the top 20 posts on Hacker Newsāso that thereās some chance of your notes being seen if youāre a contributor. But I suppose this relies on getting that rather large core group of users (e.g. HN readers) to start using the product.
Alternatively you build the thing and hope that it gets adopted in some larger way, say it gets acquired by X if they want to roll out community notes to the whole web.
My ānew & upvotedā feed on the homepage is now all zero karma posts (or perhaps ā1 to +2). Is that expected?