Researching AI governance at the intersection of political science and economics.
nemeryxu
Karma: 118
That’s right! It seems like only PEPFAR has been waived, not other life-saving programs! I am working on PEPFAR right now but would urge other EAs to contribute to other aid-related causes
Update: Seems like PEPFAR is back for at least 90 days.
Update 2: The waiver only applies to PEPFAR, not other crucial aid programs.
Maybe, though if the pause itself will cause lots of harm, might be too many frictions to do so. Would work better if the ask is “restore PEPFAR after the pause.” The other audience to target is pro-life evangelicals, which might be slightly easier on short notice
Thanks for the pointers!
I agree that a permanent stop is worse. Thanks for clarifying the situation during the pause; that sounds reassuring. Please keep the EA community updated!
Ok thanks, that matches my prior belief. However, I don’t know if receiving organizations have the funding runway to keep programs running during the pause. Do we have good (back of the envelope) calculations about the effects of the full 90 day pause (even if it is reinstated)?
How sure are you on #1? I want to organize US folks to contact their representatives and senators, but want to be specific with the ask. Is it 1) waive the pause or 2) just ensure it comes back at the end of the pause? This link makes me believe that the pause itself is stopping PEPFAR-related work, but it sounds like you think NGOs will have funding to make it through the next month?
Is anyone in EA coordinating a response to the PEPFAR pause? Seems like a very high priority thing for US-based EAs to do, and I’m keen to help if so and start something if not.
This project sounds intriguing, though I haven’t yet read about its cost effectiveness on the website. As a side note, if they don’t already, I think it would be useful for Charity Entrepreneurship or other non-profit incubators to make a concerted effort to reach out to people like you in the global south.
Doesn’t seem worth it at that point since markets will start to clear, as in Iran, lowering counterfactual impact. At that point it largely becomes a question of earning to give.
I refer to Bob Jacobs’ excellent reply for covering some of my concerns in more depth (and adding many I didn’t know about).
In principle any topic is worthy of further study. However, given the cost of information processing and amount of biased noise written on the topic by the likes of Charles Murray, I would need studies far stronger than ones done on interpolated national IQ values to update my beliefs about the topic’s importance.
Not an expert in the area, but the data on National IQ seems shoddy at best, fraudulent at worst. Due to the number of potential confounds, I don’t put much stock in cross-country regression analyses, especially when run on such poor data.
OP just joined the forum and has not provided any reason why, given the strong ties of pronatalism to the far-right, this cause is noticeably more pressing than even adjacent causes such as immigration reform. I’d recommend not engaging.
Losing some parsimony, perhaps 80,000 Hours could allow users to toggle between a “short-termist” and “longtermist” ranking of top career paths? The cost of switching rankings seems low enough that ~anyone who’s inclined to work on a longtermist cause area under the status-quo would still do so with this change.
Having done some of this modelling myself, I think it’s difficult to pin down the exact outcome of a particular race. Some empirical evidence suggests that winning a patent race leads to more follow-on innovation, while other models, including those fitted to data, suggest that laggards are often more innovative. However, models also suggest that laggards who are quite far behind tend to give up racing entirely.
My tentative conclusion is that the finding you highlight is plausible enough such that I’d consider small gaps in innovativeness to ~= neck-and-neck races, but larger gaps to produce a monopoly-like situation for the race leader. Determining where precisely this cutoff, of course, is difficult.
This lack is one (among several) reasons why I haven’t shifted any of my donations toward longtermist causes.
Thanks for your thoughts!
Good question! I’ll need to think more about this, but my initial impression is that regular surveying of developers about AI progress could help by quantifying their level of uncertainty over the arrival rate of particular milestones, which is likely correlated with how they believe expected capabilities investments map onto progress.
That seems right, though it likely depends upon how substitutable safety research is across firms.
This is really awesome! I was hoping someone from EA would implement something like this.