Rasool

Karma: 1,027

Rasool 4 Dec 2025 6:10 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Why doesn’t EA denounce OpenAI?
Karnofsky, on the Dwarkesh podcast said (emphasis mine):
I mean, you can look up our $30 million grant to OpenAI. I think it was back in 2016–– we wrote about some of the thinking behind it. Part of that grant was getting a board seat for Open Philanthropy for a few years so that we could help with their governance at a crucial early time in their development. I think some people believe that OpenAI has been net negative for the world because of the fact that they have contributed a lot to AI advancing and to AI being sort of hyped, and they think that gives us less time to prepare for it. However, I do think that all else being equal, AI advancing faster gives us less time to prepare. It is a bad thing, but I don’t think it’s the only consideration. I think OpenAI has done a number of good things too, and has set some important precedents. I think it’s probably much more interested in a lot of the issues I’m talking about and risks from advanced AI than like the company that I would guess would exist if they didn’t, would be doing similar things.
I don’t really accept that the idea that OpenAI is a negative force. I think it’s highly debatable. We could talk about it all day. If you look at our specific grant, it’s even a completely different thing because a lot of that was not just about boosting them, but about getting to be part of their early decision making. I think that was something that there were benefits and was important. My overall view is that I don’t look back on that grant as one of the better grants we’ve made, not one of the worse ones. But certainly we’ve done a lot of things that have had, you know, that have not worked out. I think there are some times shortly when we’ve done things that have consequences we didn’t intend. No philanthropist can be free of that. What we can try and do is be responsible, seriously do our homework to try to understand things beforehand, see the risks that we’re able to see, and think about how to minimize them.

Rasool 4 Dec 2025 5:59 UTC
7 points
2 ∶ 1
on: Do the WHO’s “best buys” work?
I expect there is some variability, the author in this piece focuses on alcohol, which I don’t know that much about, but for “Reduce unhealthy diet” (Objective 3, page 10), CEARCH did a report here, which relates to WHO’s best buys (if not quite exactly matching their specified intervention), and found it to be “49,419 DALYs per USD 100,000″
For best buys in education, I recommend Rachel Glennester’s 80,000 hours podcast episode, where she praises the best buys, but also criticises how education spending is done
She has a second episode, which also touches on best buys
P.S. I’m not sure why this post has two disagree votes—seems like a perfectly valid forum post to me

Rasool 17 Nov 2025 23:34 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: AGI by 2032 is extremely unlikely
Not sure if you caught it but there was a detailed critique and discussion of this 90% figure on LessWrong

Rasool 3 Nov 2025 0:25 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Charity Trap: Brain Misallocation
There’s a transcript of the Ivan Gayton podcast, and other discussion, here

Rasool 17 Oct 2025 14:34 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: AGI by 2032 is extremely unlikely
In March 2025, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, predicted that 90% of code would be written by AI as early as June 2025 and no later than September 2025. This turned out to be dead wrong.
Amodei claims that 90% of code at Anthropic (and some companies they work with) is being written by AI
What links here?
- Yarrow Bouchard 🔸's comment on Even after GPT-4, AI researchers forecasted a 50% chance of AGI by 2047 or 2116, depending how you define AGI by Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 (29 Oct 2025 0:16 UTC; 2 points)

Rasool 17 Oct 2025 14:21 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What About The Horses?
There are some interesting comments on LessWrong

Rasool 21 Sep 2025 12:30 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Stewart’s comment on: Ben Stewart’s Quick takes
I have been recommended the Drone Ultimatum podcast, but haven’t listened to any

Rasool 10 Sep 2025 9:48 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Berke’s comment on: Marginally More Effective Altruism
Discussed on the forum here

Rasool 21 Aug 2025 10:31 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
I am a huge Ted Chiang fan, but your review misses one of the most amazing things about his writing—it is written in very brief and straightforward words and sentences!
A number of his short stories are available for free online, for instance Exhalation in Lightspeed magazine. Under ‘Works’ on his Wikipedia page, you can find others (sometimes via web archives)

GiveWell fundraising up 17% in 2024, driven overwhelmingly by returning donors

Rasool21 Aug 2025 7:27 UTC

44 points

0 comments1 min readEA link

Rasool 8 Aug 2025 9:57 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
on: New podcast episode: Advancing GiveWell’s work on family planning
A large recent RCT found that free contraception had no impact on birth rates in Burkina Faso—I wonder if/how this affects this cause area

Rasool 8 Aug 2025 8:09 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A website to create bets with strangers
One website, which doesn’t quite match all your criteria, is https://longbets.org/bets/, which has bets from people like Warren Buffet, Scott Alexander, Ray Kurzweil, and Eric Schmidt

Rasool 8 Jul 2025 20:28 UTC
17 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Rasool’s Shortform
GiveWell’s cost to save a life has gone from $4,500 to a range between $3,000 and $5,500:
https://www.givewell.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-a-life
From at least as early as December 2023 (possibly as early as December 2021 when the page says it was first published) until February 2024, that page highlighted a $7.2 million 2020 grant to the Against Malaria Foundation at an estimated cost per life saved of $4,500.
The page now highlights a $6.4 million 2023 grant to the Malaria Consortium at an estimated cost per life saved of $3,000.
You can see all the estimated cost per life saved (or other relevant outcome) for all GiveWell’s grants at this spreadsheet, linked-to from:
https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates

Rasool 27 Jun 2025 16:38 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Neglectedness is overrated
Many such cases

Rasool 24 Jun 2025 22:07 UTC
23 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Need to Optimize EA Content to Show Up in AI Chats
Luckily those suggestions are all useful for SEO too!
Some other things to consider (from figures like Tyler Cowen^[1] and Patrick McKenzie^[2] (edit: also Gwern) who talk about how their primary audience is now LLMs):
- Prefer short paragraphs that restate names, titles, other nouns (rather than using pronouns (“he”/”she”/”it”)
  - So that LLMs can lift paragraphs wholesale, and minimises errors
- Consider what license your writing is published under
  - A more permissive license increases the likelihood of being included in training corpuses
- Design headlines to mirror exactly what a user’s prompt might be
- Modular layouts – Bullets, numbered lists and section headers that can be shuffled or excerpted without breaking coherence
- Fewer unexplained metaphors, sarcasm, culture-specific humour
- Start with a short summary / TLDR
  - The first 2-3 lines are often harvested by RAG or vertical search
  - Also if someone uses an AI to summarise your piece, this helps ensure accuracy
1. ^
  https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/should-you-be-writing-for-the-ais.html
2. ^
  Search for “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)” in this podcast

Rasool 24 Jun 2025 21:21 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Who are the best people you know at using LLMs for productivity?
Some answers here

Rasool 24 Jun 2025 20:34 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: HugoB’s comment on: HugoB’s Quick takes
You don’t need to listen to podcasts as soon as they come out :)
In fact with most media, you can wait a few weeks/months and then decide whether you actually want to read/watch/listen to it, rather than just defaulting to listening to it because it is new and shiny
In fact since you like Rob Wiblin, you can go and listen to old episodes (from another podcast) that he recommends

Rasool 24 Jun 2025 0:21 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tax Geek’s comment on: In Defense of “Sweatshops”
Blattman discusses this on the Rationally Speaking podcast

Rasool 14 Jun 2025 1:19 UTC
16 points
1 ∶ 0
on: UK Immigration and Public Services
The largest single category of entrant to the UK is a person on a work visa; in the most recent year of data available, about 450,000 work visas were issued.^[3] This is closely followed by the number of people on study visas, at 415,000. Most of the study visas are for masters level courses, rather than undergraduate courses.
Despite the near endless press coverage on asylum seekers, the number of refugee/humanitarian visas granted is small by comparison.^[4] Most people who move to the UK come to work or to study.^[5]
I believe you are downplaying the dependant visa. Of the 450,000^[1] work visas issued, 212,000 were main applicants and 255,000 were dependants.
(Using this source, removing the columns for 2018 and 2019)
Indeed combining Main Applicant vs Dependant for all visa categories, shows a marked rise in the proportion of dependants from 2020-2023:
1. ^
  You wrote 450,000 work visas were issued in the most recent year of data available, but I got that sum looking at 2023 (and 2024 is far lower), it’s possible they have updated the website since you checked it to include 2024 numbers.

Rasool 17 May 2025 15:24 UTC
35 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Alert on the Toner-Rodgers paper
To anyone skimming this, this has nothing to do with former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, but rather a paper by an unrelated person with the last name Toner-Rodgers

Rasool

GiveWell fundrais­ing up 17% in 2024, driven over­whelm­ingly by re­turn­ing donors

GiveWell fundraising up 17% in 2024, driven overwhelmingly by returning donors