Iād be willing to bet at good odds that cold emailing funders leads to a higher degree fundraising success.
I agree that itās annoying to receive dozens of cold emails every week about funding, that this is a bad equilibrium, and that it therefore might be worth shunning.
What are the other 3 on your Mount Rushmore?
I have been a firm believer in predictions markets since first learning about them over a decade ago (still am). I certainly did not predict this would happen, nor would have I seen it as a plausible outcome had you asked me.
I donāt know of anyone else who did either, neither in the for or against camp. The counterarguments were always:
Assassination markets
Insider trading
Something something unduly influencing results of elections
I donāt remember seeing any list of counter arguments which included: āwill be optimised to prey on people with weak impulse controlā.
perhaps targetmalaria.org
Anyone here who is planning to donate Ā£5000-10000 to registered UK charities before end of year?
If so, I would like to facilitate a donor swap to animal welfare charities:
- Asia Accountability Initiative
- Screwworm Free Future
(ie. I give to the UK registered charity you were planning on donating to, and you donate to my preferred charity instead).
For inspiration, both Givewell and Giving What We Can are UK tax deductible, so anyone making donations to those could in principle do a swap.
I disagree completely. The goal of a job ad should be to turn off candidates who are not a good fit so they donāt bother applying, and turn on applicants who would be a good fit.
Their job ad being divisive is a good thing, if it is effective at filtering for the people they are looking for.
There was that RCT showing that creatine supplementation boosted the IQs of only vegetarians.
My understanding is that the most rigorous RCT on creatine for cognitive performance found no difference between vegetarians and meat eaters and virtually no effect size in either case.
(conflict of interest note, Iām pretty good friends with Apartās founder)
One thing I really like about Apart is how meritocratic it is. Anyone can sign up for a hackathon, and if your project is great, win a prize. They then help prize winners with turning their project into publishable research. This year two prize winners even ended up presenting their work orally at ICLR (!!).
Nobody cares what school you went to. Nobody is looking at your gender age or resume. What matters is the quality of your work and nothing but.
And it turns out that when you look just at quality of the work, youāll find that it comes from all over the worldāoften countries that are otherwise underrepresented in the EA and AI safety community. I think that is really really cool.
I think apart could do a much better job at communicating just how different their approach is to the vast majority of AI upskilling programmes, which heavily rely on evaluating your credentials to decide if youāre worthy of doing serious research.
I donāt know anything about the cost-per-participant and whether that justifies funding apart over AI safety projects, but there is something very beautiful and special about Apartās approach to me.
The EA movement is chock-full of people who are good at programming. What about open-sourcing the EA source code and outsourcing development of new features to volunteer members who want to contribute?
no, thanks
This post makes me feel very positive about GWWC and its future! Itās hard to overrate the value of focus. One thing I would love to learn is what you are doubling down on as a result.
No idea, itās probably worth reaching out to ask them and alert them in case they arenāt already mindful of it! I personally am not the least bit interested in this concern, so I will not take any action to address it.
I am not saying this to be a dick (I hope), but because I donāt want to give you a mistaken impression that we are currently making any effort to address this consideration at Screwworm Free Future.
I think people are far too happy to give an answer like: āThanks for highlighting this concern, we are very mindful of this throughout our workā which while nice-sounding is ultimately dishonest and designed to avoid criticism. EA needs more honesty and you deserve to know my actual stance.
I donāt mind at all someone looking into this and I am happy to change my mind if presented with evidence, but my prior for this changing my mind is so low that I donāt currently consider it worthwhile to spend time investigating or even encouraging others to investigate.
EDIT: Since this post is getting traction again, Iāll highlight that SFF did eventually end up spending time thinking about the impacts on insect welfare and we are looking to include these effects in our CEA. Currently we think gene drives (to create eg. male-only strains) look tentatively positive for screwworm as it would reduce screwworm that currently are factory farmed for SIT.
Wishing Centre For, the best of luck!
I do a lot of writing at my job, and find myself using AI more and more for drafting. I find it especially helpful when I am stuck.
Like any human assigned with a writing task, Claude cannot magically guess what you want. I find that when I see other people get lackluster writing results with AI, itās very often due to providing almost no context for the AI to work with.
When asking for help with a draft, I will often write out a few paragraphs of thoughts on the draft. For example, if I were brainstorming ideas for a title, I might write out a prompt like:
āI am looking to create a title for the following document: <document>.
My current best attempt at a title is: āWhy LLMs need context to do good workā
I think this title does a good job at explaining the core message, namely that LLMs cannot guess what you want if you donāt provide sufficient context, but it does a poor job at communicating <some other thing I care about communicating>.
Please help brainstorm ten other titles, from which we can ideate.ā
Perhaps Claude comes up with two good titles, or one title has a word I particularly like. Then I might follow up saying:
āI like this word, it captures <some concept> very well. Can we ideate a few more ideas using this word?ā
From this process, I will usually get out something good, which I wouldnāt have been able to think of myself. Usually Iāll take those sentences, work them into my draft, and continue.
Really incredible job, really exciting to see so many great projects come out of Catalyze. Hopefully people will consider funding not just the projects, but also consider the new incubator which created them!
On a side note, I am especially excited about TamperSec and see their work as the most important technical contribution that can be made to AI governance currently.
Donāt put all of your savings into shady cryptocurrencies. If it sounds good to be true, it is because it probably is.
that when I wrote the comment, the post was at ā4 upvotes!
Why on earth are people downvoting this post?
Figuring out how to respond to the USAID freeze (and then doing it) is probably the most important question in global health and development right now. That there has been virtually no discussion on the forum so far has frankly been quite shocking to me.
Have a fat upvote, wishing you the best of luck
huh, thatās a really interesting point.
Now that you have me thinking about it, I actually wouldnāt be surprised to learn if the wild animal welfare effects turn out to be the higher order bit