Iâm a software engineer on the CEA Online team, mostly working on the EA Forum. We are currently interested in working with impactful projects as contractors/âconsultants, please fill in this form if you think you might be a good fit for this.
You can contact me at will.howard@centreforeffectivealtruism.org
PSA: The CEA dashboard is now up to date again[1]! It had been stale since June 2024 due to some issues in the recent data which needed cleaning up. We are planning to (as before) update this approximately once a month.
Apart from a couple of sections which are flagged in the dashboard
Iâm curating this post. I was impressed by level of the detail on how ISO 26000 is put into practice, and I found the diagnosis of gaps in the AI safety ecosystem to be plausible. I know this was written as an academic exercise, but I found it to be more through through than many papers on AI governance from policy organisations.
Tickets are ÂŁ120 per person which includes accommodation and food. Thatâs the at-cost price.
This is incredible for a 4 day event!
Iâm curating this post. Itâs concise and uses a straightforward methodology, and I think the takeaway finding is an important idea to spread awareness of (that people are quite resistant to stopping eating meat).
Iâm curating this post. It makes a good case on purely price, taste, and convenience grounds for why alt proteins are still trailing behind animal products.
For a counterpoint people may be interested in reading Price-, Taste-, and Convenience-Competitive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Currently Replace Meat.
Out of interest, did there happen to be a tender offer running since this post came out or is there some other way you can sell the shares?
+1, I do all my budgeting in Monzo and I find it to be really good. In addition to these features I find the budgeting by category very useful, and the fact that it doesnât require copying the data out to somewhere else makes it much easier to stick to.
I personally find it simpler to do it this way because:
Itâs easier to change the amount and where you are donating to
Not all employers offer Payroll Giving, you could probably ask them to set it up but that would be a hassle. Iâm currently employed via Deel, which doesnât offer it as far as Iâm aware
Also I found ringing them up really quite straightforward, it took me maybe 15 mins each time.
Iâm borrowing this example from the Payroll Giving topic page:
You earn ÂŁ60,000 per year (making your marginal tax band 40%). You donate ÂŁ1,200 to a charity after youâve been paid. The charity can claim 25% from the government, giving them ÂŁ1,500. And you can claim a tax rebate of ÂŁ300 (1500 * 0.2), meaning you are only out-of-pocket ÂŁ900.
The way they actually get the ÂŁ300 into your bank account is by adjusting your tax code, which means you pay less tax for the rest of the year.
In a tax code like 1257L, the 1257 means you pay zero tax on the first ÂŁ12,570. Changing this to e.g. 1258L effectively shifts all the tax bands up by ÂŁ10, so if the highest band you were in was 40% this gets you an extra ÂŁ4.
In the above case, they would add ÂŁ750 to the tax-free allowance, to save you . So this would change your tax code from 1257L to 1332L (equal to )
You can use this to check theyâve done the adjustment correctly when you talk to them over the phone. It should be the case that:
I realize that maybe the other people here in the thread have so little trust in the survey designers that theyâre worried that, if they answer with the low-probability, higher-EV option, the survey designers will write takeaways like âmore EAs are in favor of donating to speculative AI risk.â
Iâm one of the people who agreed with @titotalâs comment, and it was because of something like this.
Itâs not that Iâm worried per se that the survey designers will write a takeaway that puts a spin on this question (last time they just reported it neutrally). Itâs more that I expect this question[1] to be taken by other orgs/âpeople as a proxy metric for the EA communityâs support for hits-based interventions. And because of the practicalities of how information is acted on the subtlety of the wording of the question might be lost in the process (e.g. in an organisation someone might raise the issue at some point, but it would eventually end up as a number in a spreadsheet or BOTEC, and there is no principled way to adjust for the issue that titotal describes).
And one other about supporting low-probability/âhigh-impact interventions
I think this table from the paper gives a good idea of the exact methodology:
Like others Iâm not convinced this is a meaningful âred line crossingâ, because non-AI computer viruses have been able to replicate themselves for a long time, and the AI had pre-written scripts it could run to replicate itself.
The reason (made up by me) non-AI computer viruses arenât a major threat to humanity is that:
They are fragile, they canât get around serious attempts to patch the system they are exploiting
They lack the ability to escalate their capabilities once they replicate themselves (a ransomware virus canât also take control of your car)
I donât think this paper shows these AI models making a significant advance on these two things. I.e. if you found this model self-replicating you could still shut it down easily, and this experiment doesnât in itself show the ability of the models to self-improve.
I just sent out the Forum digest and I thought there was a higher number of underrated (and slightly unusual) posts this week, so Iâm re-sharing some of them here:
Detection of Asymptomatically Spreading Pathogens by @Jeff Kaufman (I think the slide-show format works really well)
The anti-clickbait titled Next-gen LLINs with chlorfenapyr by @Scott Smith, which analyses the effect of using chlorfenapyr rather than pyrethroid as an insecticide in bednets. This reduces the effect of insecticide-resistance
I donât work on the EAG team, but I believe applications havenât opened yet because the exact date and location havenât been decided (cc @RobertHarling)
Iâm curating this post. I really enjoyed the argument-rebuttal format used here, and it does a great job of tiling out the common flavours of PAV arguments.
I think itâs a shame the Nucleic Acid Observatory are getting so few votes.
They are relatively cheap (~$2M/âyear) and are working on a unique intervention that on the face of it seems like it would be very important if successful. At least as far as Iâm aware there is no other (EA) org that explicitly has the goal of creating a global early warning system for pandemics.
By the logic of it being valuable to put the first few dollars into something unique/âneglected I think it looks very good (although I would want to do more research if it got close to winning).
Ah, I hadnât thought of that, and I can see how this makes the results indeterminate (because reallocating the votes from one joint-last candidate could bump the other joint-last candidate up from the bottom).
Iâll have a think about how to handle this and get back to you, my initial thought is still to break ties randomly (with a stable-but-random ranking of the precedence of each candidate in a tie).
(Discussed separately) I think it would be best to split the pot 4 ways if this happens, because there is some chance of introducing a bias by deciding when to end based on a property of the votes. Or if there is some reason we canât do this that Iâm not aware of (e.g. legal constraints), then breaking the tie with a coin flip.
(@Lorenzo Buonannođž You can consider this the official answer unless I hear otherwise).
Iâm curating this post. This was my favourite post from Funding Strategy Week. It makes a straightforward but important point that is useful to keep in mind.
Thanks for flagging this @Bella! There was a bug which made it update everyoneâs comment whenever anyone changed their vote đ€Šââïž. This is fixed now