Coach & AI Safety Field Builder, currently working on aisafety.berlin and exploring a match-making service idea (early stage, not yet public)
Formerly director of EA Germany, EA Berlin and EAGxBerlin 2022
Happy to connect with people with shared interests. Message me with ideas, proposals, feedback, connections or just random thoughts!
I read the Dutch version earlier last year and really enjoyed it! Interesting stories (e.g. how Ralph Nader established car safety) and fun to read. Reminded me of What We Owe The Future in some ways.
AIM (Charity Entrepreneurship) gets an entire chapter, and is the main EA org he writes about.
Curious that 80k is hardly mentioned at all. I wonder if that’s a conscious choice because he did not want to recommend 80k, or it simply did not fit in his story. Maybe Rutger resonates more with neartermist EA and therefore left out longtermist orgs like 80k. The cause areas the School for Moral Ambition (SMA) prioritzed so far in their fellowship were also more neartermist: alternative protein & tobacco control.
@Benjamin_Todd recently made a similar argument for why existing capital might matter even more post-AGI, sharing this here for anyone who’d like more context:
“AGI probably causes wages to increase initially, but eventually they collapse. Once AI models can deploy energy and other capital more efficiently to do useful things, there’s no reason to employ most humans any more. [...]”
Veritasium also sometimes does EA-related content, like his video on Oppenheimer or other scientists who had outsized impact on the world (both positive and negative)
I voted for promising early-stage orgs, as they seem often more funding-constrained and more cost-effective on the margin than established organizations (who have a much easier time fundraising). More speculative, but seemed worth the risk. I like this format, thanks for organizing this!
I’m excited you’re doing this! This seems helpful to fill this gap in AIS field building.
(I’m late to the party, just saw this now in a newsletter)
tldr: Do high school still neglect ethics / moral philosophy in their curriculums? Mine did (year 2012). Are there tractable ways to improve the situation, through national/state education policy or reaching out to schools and teachers? Has this been researched / tried before?
The public high school I went to in Rottweil (rural Southern Germany) was overall pretty good, probably top 2-10% globally, except for one thing: Moral philosophy. 90min/week “Christian Religion” was the default for everyone, in which we spent most of the time interpreting stories from the bible, most of which to me felt pretty irrelevant to the present. This was in 2012 in Germany, a country with more atheists than Christians as of 2023, and even in 2012 my best guess is that <20% of my classmates were practicing a religion.
Only in grade 10, we got the option to switch to secular Ethics classes instead, which only <10% of the students did (Religion was considered less work).
Ethics class quickly became one of my favorite classes. For the first time in my life I had a regular group of people equally interested in discussing Vegetarianism and other such questions (almost everyone in my school ate meat, and vegetarians were sometimes made fun of). Still, the curriculum wasn’t great, we spent too much time with ancient Greek philosophers and very little time discussing moral philosophy topics relevant to the present.
How have your experiences been in high school? I’m especially curious about more recent experiences.
Are there tractable ways to improve the situation? Has anyone researched this?
1) Could we get ethics classes in the mandatory/default curriculum in more schools? Which countries or states seem best for that? In Germany, education is state-regulated—which German state might be most open to this? Hamburg? Berlin?
2) Is there a shortage in ethics teachers (compared to religion teachers)? Can we get teachers more interested in teaching ethics?
3) Are any teachers here teaching ethics? Would you like to connect more with other (EA/ethics) teachers? We could open a whatsapp group, if there’s not already one.
Forwarding private comment from a friend: Interoperability was part of Digital Markets Act, so EVP Ribera will be main enforcer, and was asked about her stance in her EU parliament confirmation hearing yesterday. You could watch that / write her team abt the underrated cybersecurity benefits of interoperability esp. given it would upgrade WhatsApp’s encryption.
Curious to get your thoughts on this too!
Thanks for looking up their funding situations, appreciate it!
I meant neglected as in “they don’t seem to prioritize it for whichever reason”, not necessarily funding- or capacity-constraints.
I see how they might not want to implement some of these features, though even in the case of “show message history” to new members, there could be more elegant solutions like giving members the option to opt-in to sharing their messages with new people in the group.
Other features like “enabling community chats / supergroup” or “better chat archiving & sorting chats in folders” seem not in conflict with privacy, at least not obviously. Generally they do seem to copy many features from other messengers (they recently launched stories, similar to Whatsapp status), they just seem a lot slower than Whatsapp and Telegram to adopt these things and far behind.
Forwarding private comment from a friend: Interoperability was part of Digital Markets Act, so EVP Ribera will be main enforcer, and was asked about her stance in her EU parliament confirmation hearing yesterday. You could watch that / write her team abt the underrated cybersecurity benefits of interoperability esp. given it would upgrade WhatsApp’s encryption
Signal (similar to Whatsapp) is the only truly privacy-friendly popular messenger I know. Whatsapp and Telegram also offer end-to-end encryption (Telegram only in “secret chats”) but they still collect metadata like your contacts, and many people I meet strongly prefer Signal for various reasons: Some people work in cybersecurity and have strong privacy preferences, others dislike Telegram (bad rep, popular among conspiratists, spam) and Meta (Whatsapp owner). For some vulnerable people such activists in authoritarian regimes or whistleblowers in powerful organizations, secure messaging seems essential, and Signal seems to be the best tool we have.
While Signal is improving, I still often find it annoying to use compared to Telegram. Here just some examples:
1) it’s easily overwhelming: No sorting chats in folders, archiving group chats doesn’t really work (they keep popping back to ‘unarchived’ whenever someone writes a new message), lots of notifications I don’t care about like “user xyz changed their security number” and no way to turn them off
2) no option to make chat history visible to new group members, which is really annoying for some use cases
3) no poll feature, no live location sharing
4) no “community”/supergroup feature, people need to find and manually join all different groups in a community
5) no threads (in Telegram that’s possible in announcement channels)
I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re collectively losing thousands or even millions of productive hours and valuable attention on Signal (I would strongly recommend Slack over Signal, but for some use cases or some users Slack doesn’t work). This seems high in scope, neglected and tractable to me.
Curious to get your thoughts on:
a) Disagree with my argument? Am I missing anything?
b) What’s the bottleneck of Signal? Is it a matter of prioritization, funding/talent (edit: probably not, see harfe’s comment), or something else? Does anyone have insights?
c) Can we help? How?
9.7/10 average rating* is extremely good. Well done!
Also cool to see the Nigerian and African EA community growing. Keep us updated!
(*I don’t think average rating is the most important metric, the expected impact from the conference seems more important, but it’s a useful metric nevertheless)
Are you still active? The website seems offline.
This seems pretty bad news from an AI safety perspective :/
Any chance to override his veto, or get a similar bill passed soon?
More context:
TechCrunch article (not paywalled like the WSJ article)
Response from Senator Wiener on Twitter + discussion
Thanks for sharing!
@Jeff Kaufman Would you like to respond to this? Do you feel like this addresses your concerns sufficiently? Any updates in either direction?
I just skimmed it due to time constraints, but from what I read and from the reactions this looks like a very thoughtful response, and at least a short reply seems appropriate.
If anyone here also would like more context on this, I found @Garrison’s reporting from 16 August quite insightful:
The Tech Industry is the Biggest Blocker to Meaningful AI Safety Regulations
Thank you for the comprehensive research! California state policy as a lever for AI regulation hasn’t been much on my radar yet, and as a European concerned about AI risk, I found this very insightful. Curious if you (or anyone here) have thoughts on the following:
1) Is there anything we can and should do right now? Any thoughts on Holly’s “tell your reps to vote yes on SB 1047” post from last week? Anything else we can do?
2) How do you see the potential for California state regulation in the next few years. Should we invest more resources in this, relative to US AI policy?
I understand your concern, thanks for flagging this!
To add a perspective: As a former EA movement builder who thought about this a bunch, the reputation risks of accepting donations from a platform by an organization that also organizes events that some people found too “edgy” seem very low to me. I’d encourage EA community organizers to apply, if the money would help them do more good, and if they’re concerned about risks, ask CEA or other senior EA community organizers for advice.
Generally, I feel many EAs (me included) lean towards being too risk-averse and hesitant to take action than too risk-seeking (see omission bias). I’m also a bit worried about increasing pressure on community organizers not to take risks and worry about reputation more than they need to. This is just a general impression, I might be wrong, and I still think there are many organizers who might be not sufficiently aware of the risks, so thanks for pointing this out!
Cool that you’re doing this! I could share two failures, one in my career plans and one in job applications. I could do that in 1-4min, depending on how many other people want to share and how much time we have. Looking forward! :)
I’ve been in touch with some of the School for Moral Ambition (SMA) co-founders and the DACH director, and my sense is that all of them are very collaborative and interested in EA or even members of the community. I think SMA and EA have quite a lot of synergies, if they keep in touch with each other and don’t see each other as competition.
I see SMA as a unique chance to reach more people and more senior professionals, and get them excited about doing the most good. They might also be able to unlock additional funding for effective charities. I’m very excited to see them grow.