This question has troubled me as well, plus the idea that once you get a high-impact job, if it turns out not to be a perfect fit, there are transaction costs to the organisastion replacing you with a better candidate
Rasool
Karma: 817
UK to cut its international aid budget 40% from 2027
Kurzgesagt video on factory farming
I don’t think it’s necessary for EA to denounce Musk on the basis that apart from a vague endorsement of a book a few years back and some general comments on AI safety which run in the opposite direction to his actual actions, he doesn’t seem to be associated with EA at all
I think you are downplaying Musk’s (historic) association with EA, he was a speaker at EA Global 2015, and donated at least $10m to FLI’s AI safety research grants (both mentioned at this link)
This section from Tu Youyou’s Wikipedia page is incredible:
As Tu also presented at the project seminar, its preparation was described in a recipe from a 1,600-year-old traditional Chinese herbal medicine text titled Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One’s Sleeve. At first, it was ineffective because they extracted it with traditional boiling water. Tu discovered that a low-temperature extraction process could be used to isolate an effective antimalarial substance from the plant; Tu says she was influenced by the source, written in 340 by Ge Hong, which states that this herb should be steeped in cold water. This book instructed the reader to immerse a handful of qinghao in water, wring out the juice, and drink it all. Since hot water damages the active ingredient in the plant, she proposed a method using low temperature ether to extract the effective compound instead.
Two notification-related suggestions:
I would like to be able to “middle click” on individual notifications to open them in new tabs. At the moment I believe you can only single click on them to open them in the current tab. This middle click behaviour does exist on LessWrong
Related to this:
Click on a new comment notification (it opens in your current tab)
Scroll around on the page as you normally would
Click on the bell notification icon
As you hover over the notification that you originally clicked on, it shifts the focus of the page to that comment
Is that the intended behaviour? I find it quite jarring
What is the difference between this post and your previous one?
What about this current administration and possible TAI is the failure? Is orthogonal to American ‘democracy’ as outlined in the post?
Here is an online version of the book annotated by the author:
Screwworm is a flesh-eating maggot!
I skimmed past many posts like this, assuming that it was some kind of stomach worm, or related to the suffering of wild worms (not that I am opposed to either of those, they just don’t grab my attention as strongly)
Google Sheets also has a criminally under appreciated tool—Google App Script
You can write custom code, as Javascript, and have it run on a schedule, or as a function in a spreadsheet cell, or as a clickable menu item
Re: Possible investment strategies there is a dialogue on LessWrong from November 2023 which I think still holds up. Quoting from the takeaways:
Invest like 50% of my portfolio into pretty broad index funds with really no particular specializationTake like 20% of my portfolio and throw it into some more tech/AI focused index fund. Maybe look around for something that covers some of the companies listed here on the brokerage interface that is presented to me (probably do a bit more research here)
Invest like 3-5% of my portfolio into each of Nvidia, TSMC, Microsoft, Google, ASML and Amazon
Take like 2-5% of my portfolio and use it to buy some options (probably some long-term call options on some of the stocks above), making really sure I buy ones that have limited downside, and see whether I can successfully not blow up that part of my portfolio for like 2 years before I do any more here
And then I probably wouldn’t bother much with rebalancing and basically forget about it unless I feel like paying much extra attention.
About energy companies, I think the investment idea is less about general global energy consumption via AI, but rather the companies that are helping to build out and power these large data centres.
Microsoft have been investing in nuclear energy, xAI’s Colossus cluster was positioned right next to a natural gas plant, Sam Altman invested in and is now chair of the board of nuclear startup Oklo. And my understanding is that power substation equipment is a bottleneck with equipment like transformers now having a lead time of years
GiveWell raised less than its 10th percentile forecast in 2023
New TIME magazine article on the UK AI Safety Institute (AISI)
Dylan Patel of Semianalysis (one of the leading semiconductor research firms) did a good recent episode on the Bg2 podcast where he covers this question and others:
I agree with Greg that I’m not sure how causal that all was, as Vitalik says on the 80000 hours podcast:
Yeah. And when I got the Shiba tokens in 2021, I fully identified as EA then, and I was fully on board with defending the EAs against all of the various Twitter criticism. But at the same time, if you look at where I gave those donations, it was just a pretty broad spray across a bunch of things — the largest share of which basically had to do with global public health
(emphasis mine)
And as for the timing, in that same podcast episode he says:
What ended up happening was I was anticipating that these coins would just totally crash and burn, and they’d at most be able to cash out maybe $25 million. And I thought that, OK, there’s this very acute emergency situation in India, and they have to go and act quickly. And let’s act quickly, because if you act slowly, then, one, the COVID issue would… like, the opportunity to help would be gone — but also because that was in the middle of a crazy crypto bubble, and those coins could drop by 90% tomorrow. So I was definitely acting very hastily.
Well put! I will add that the competition includes companies like Amazon creating their own chips and others designing silicon specialised for inference (like Groq (not to be confused with xAI’s model Grok))
I got an email from the IDC yesterday saying that they received “over 130 submissions” which is far fewer than I expected.
People who made a submission based on this post are a meaningful portion of all those who engaged with this process!
You might find this post interesting, which covered this and 3 other similar recent economics papers
Great write-up!
About the Vestergaard PFAS story, GiveWell did make a comment here