MathiasKB🔸

Karma: 6,765

MathiasKB🔸 26 Apr 2026 20:27 UTC
14 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It
What are the other 3 on your Mount Rushmore?

MathiasKB🔸 20 Apr 2026 13:49 UTC
36 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: Cullen 🔸’s comment on: Cullen_OKeefe’s Shortform
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 don’t know of anyone else who did either, neither in the for or against camp. The counterarguments were always:
1. Assassination markets
2. Insider trading
3. Something something unduly influencing results of elections
I don’t remember seeing any list of counter arguments which included: “will be optimised to prey on people with weak impulse control”.

MathiasKB🔸 13 Oct 2025 7:55 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kestrel🔸’s comment on: Kestrel’s Quick takes
perhaps targetmalaria.org

MathiasKB🔸 30 Sep 2025 9:12 UTC
20 points
0 ∶ 0
on: MathiasKirkBonde’s Shortform
Anyone here who is planning to donate £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.

MathiasKB🔸 25 Sep 2025 19:54 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 5
in reply to: Yadav’s comment on: Yadav’s Shortform
I disagree completely. The goal of a job ad should be to turn off candidates who are not a good fit so they don’t 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.

MathiasKB🔸 25 Sep 2025 14:19 UTC
21 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming
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.

MathiasKB🔸 28 May 2025 10:38 UTC
37 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Why is Apart Research suddenly in dire need of funding?
(conflict of interest note, I’m pretty good friends with Apart’s 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, you’ll find that it comes from all over the world—often 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 you’re worthy of doing serious research.
I don’t 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 Apart’s approach to me.
What links here?
- Why is Apart Research suddenly in dire need of funding? by Eevee🔹 (28 May 2025 7:43 UTC; 97 points)

MathiasKB🔸 16 May 2025 20:48 UTC
33 points
16 ∶ 9
on: Three lower-cost options for running the EA Forum
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?

MathiasKB🔸 11 Apr 2025 7:59 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Karla Still 🔸’s comment on: GWWC is retiring 10 initiatives
no, thanks

MathiasKB🔸 10 Apr 2025 20:39 UTC
40 points
17 ∶ 1
on: GWWC is retiring 10 initiatives
This post makes me feel very positive about GWWC and its future! It’s hard to overrate the value of focus. One thing I would love to learn is what you are doubling down on as a result.

MathiasKB🔸 4 Apr 2025 10:23 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Launching Screwworm-Free Future – Funding and Support Request
No idea, it’s probably worth reaching out to ask them and alert them in case they aren’t 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 don’t 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: “Thanks for highlighting this concern, we are very mindful of this throughout our work” 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 don’t 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 don’t currently consider it worthwhile to spend time investigating or even encouraging others to investigate.

EDIT: Since this post is getting traction again, I’ll 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.

MathiasKB🔸 1 Apr 2025 20:17 UTC
12 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Centre for Effective Altruism Is No Longer “Effective Altruism”-Related
Wishing Centre For, the best of luck!

MathiasKB🔸 18 Mar 2025 12:45 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Favorite Recent LLM Prompts & Tips?
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, it’s 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:

“I am looking to create a title for the following document: <document>.

My current best attempt at a title is: ’Why LLMs need context to do good work’

I think this title does a good job at explaining the core message, namely that LLMs cannot guess what you want if you don’t 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.”

Perhaps Claude comes up with two good titles, or one title has a word I particularly like. Then I might follow up saying:
“I like this word, it captures <some concept> very well. Can we ideate a few more ideas using this word?”
From this process, I will usually get out something good, which I wouldn’t have been able to think of myself. Usually I’ll take those sentences, work them into my draft, and continue.

MathiasKB🔸 10 Mar 2025 22:16 UTC
14 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Introducing 11 New AI Safety Organizations—Catalyze’s Winter 24/25 London Incubation Program Cohort
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.

MathiasKB🔸 10 Mar 2025 11:40 UTC
32 points
12 ∶ 0
on: How it all went: update from Anthony, a farmer in eastern Uganda—plus one final request for EA!
Don’t put all of your savings into shady cryptocurrencies. If it sounds good to be true, it is because it probably is.

MathiasKB🔸 26 Feb 2025 10:06 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: USAID Aid Freeze—Bridge Fund established—Donate now for immediate relief
that when I wrote the comment, the post was at −4 upvotes!

MathiasKB🔸 24 Feb 2025 17:33 UTC
22 points
8 ∶ 2
on: USAID Aid Freeze—Bridge Fund established—Donate now for immediate relief
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

MathiasKB🔸 18 Feb 2025 15:40 UTC
11 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Joseph Lemien’s comment on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
More dakka is to pour more firepower onto a problem. Two examples:
Example: “bright lights don’t help my seasonal depression”. More dakka: “have you tried even brighter lights?”
Example: we brainstormed ten ideas, none of them seem good. More dakka: “Try listing a 100 ideas”

MathiasKB🔸 5 Feb 2025 10:31 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 1
on: AI welfare vs. AI rights
Thank you for pursuing this line of argument, I think the question of legal rights for AI is a really important one. One thought i’ve had reading your previous posts about this, is whether it legal rights will matter not only for securing the welfare of AI but also for safeguarding humanity.
I haven’t really thought this fully through, but here’s my line of thinking:
As we are currently on track to create superintelligence and I don’t think we can say anything with much confidence about whether the AI we create will value the same things as us, it might be important to set up mechanisms which make peaceful collaboration with humanity the most attractive option for superintelligent AI(s) to get what they want.

If your best bet for getting what you want involves eliminating all humans, you are a lot more likely to eliminate all humans!

MathiasKB🔸 1 Jan 2025 11:55 UTC
31 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: OscarD🔸’s comment on: Launching Screwworm-Free Future – Funding and Support Request
I have pushed the idea on the CE research team to the point I’m sure they’re sick of hearing me rant about it!

To my knowledge it’s on their list of ideas to research for their next round of animal welfare charities