I think 'elitism' is not a helpful frame for understanding things here. 

I am just wondering about mid-career professionals: Could one not easily abandon the focus on elite universities for this group?

The focus on top universities is to access the people there. Mid-career people (outside of researchers) are no longer at university, so they are not primarily accessed through university groups. I don't think anyone is applying a harsh undergrad filter to people with strong track records in their field (at least, I'd expect most EAs to be less credentialist that is the norm for e.g. government hiring), and I'm confused why you would think this was the case.

Another idea: force each tier of votes to have at least say 10 members. So even when the highest karma person breaches a new threshold, they don't get the extra firepower until there are at least nine other great powers to join them.

Presumably NDA + forbidden to talk about the NDA (hence forbidden to talk about being forbidden to talk about ... )

Are you sure this is right?

The founder, Kevin Esvelt, who was not present with us, has a PhD in international relations with a focus on foreign policy-making. Before founding SecureBio, he was concerned about the lack of preparedness for existential risks from AI.

If you click the link it says he has a biochemistry PhD, and my impression is he has always been more of a bio guy (arguably the bio guy):

Kevin M. Esvelt is an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Sculpting Evolution Group in advancing biotechnology safely.

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University for inventing a synthetic microbial ecosystem to rapidly evolve useful biomolecules, and subsequently helped pioneer the development of CRISPR, a powerful new method of genome engineering.

Surely part of it is the fact that public health authorities were given a lot of power during COVID and are widely perceived as having frequently abused it, which discredited them in the eyes of many people and make them disinclined to give them more power.

You have some good hypothesis. One other: a lot of left wing activist types (who are disproportionately noisy) have very strong ideological purity preferences, so a person with mainly left wing views but some right wing views can be condemned for the latter, and likewise a movement with mainly left wing people but a few right wing people can be condemned. Any sufficiently public person or movement, unless they are very homogeneous or very PR-conscious, will eventually reveal they have some diversity of views and hence be subject to potential censure.

• Overall, child mortality decreased significantly between 1960 and 2000. 
• Three-quarters of the reduction happened between 1960 and 1980, coincident with the introduction of the War on Poverty, which included programs like food stamps, housing assistance, and healthcare for the poor.

This seems misleading to me. If you look at a longer term chart you can see that most of the decline occured before 1960 and the programs you mentioned. The trend improved a bit in 1960 vs the prior ten years but remained worse than in the earlier period. Overall I would summarize it as 'things improved over time, the low hanging fruit were picked first, and there are no clear inflection points'.

Additionally, I checked ten other countries (Canada, UK, AUstralia, Netherlands, Austria, Frnace, germany, Italy, Norway, Japan) and they all had a similar trend of faster declines in 1960-1980 and then slower; it's possible they all enacted similar policies at the same time, but alternatively they all benefit from advances in medicine, technology and general GDP growth. 

After doing this I also checked Brazil and Mexico because I think people often inappropriately only compare the US to Europe, but they were sufficiently higher it made the chart hard to read.

Why is poverty so intractable here if we're spending so much to reduce it? Many benefits included in this $600B category of welfare are incredibly difficult to access, are conditioned on work or other life circumstances, and are significantly restricted. 

This also seems misleading. Regardless of how difficult it was to access, my understanding is that this $600B number is an actual spending number. If you think it is puzzling that poverty hasn't been solved with $600B, the fact that the number would have counterfactually been even higher absent some constraints isn't an answer.

In the richest country in the world, 19.8M Americans attempt to cover food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and medicine every day with a single twenty dollar bill.^[1]

This is not true. I'm very confused because in the footnote you note it's not true and then... don't correct it?

Wait a minute, the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) doesn’t account for government benefits! That’s true. Another poverty statistic is the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which accounts for variable living costs and factors government benefits into its estimate. In 2022, the percentage of people living in poverty according to the SPM was nearly 1 point higher than the OPM estimate, meaning citing the OPM here is not overstating the scale of poverty

Lets try to sort this out, reverse-engineering what you did:

• You calculate 19.8m Americans based on multiplying 325,521,470 total population by 6.1%. Fair enough.
• You calculate $20 by taking a $15,060 threshold and dividing by 365.25 and then by by two again to get those at half the 'poverty line', and then rounding down. Fair enough.
• You assert that these people have to pay for food, shelter, clothing etc. with only this. But in doing so you ignore all the other sources of income which are excluded from this calculation. So the stated line is just false.
• Your footnote acknowledges this, and then cites the supplementary poverty measure as a workaround.
• It is true that the supplementary poverty measure (correctly, IMO) includes many other sources of real income for poor people.
• But it then subtracts things like medical expenses and transportation costs!
• So it's still false to say that people have to cover all those expenses with that income, because that income is after those expenses.

The full quote suggests this is because he classifies Operation Warp Speed (reactive, targeted) as very different from the Office (wasteful, impossible to predict what you'll need, didn't work last time). I would classify this as a disagreement about means rather than ends.

One last question, Mr. President, because I know that your time is limited, and I appreciate your generosity. We have just reached the four-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic. One of your historic accomplishments was Operation Warp Speed. If we were to have another pandemic, would you take the same actions to manufacture and distribute a vaccine and get it in the arms of Americans as quickly as possible?

Trump: I did a phenomenal job. I appreciate the way you worded that question. So I have a very important Democrat friend, who probably votes for me, but I'm not 100% sure, because he's a serious Democrat, and he asked me about it. He said Operation Warp Speed was one of the greatest achievements in the history of government. What you did was incredible, the speed of it, and the, you know, it was supposed to take anywhere from five to 12 years, the whole thing. Not only that: the ventilators, the therapeutics, Regeneron and other things. I mean Regeneron was incredible. But therapeutics—everything. The overall—Operation Warp Speed, and you never talk about it. Democrats talk about it as if it’s the greatest achievement. So I don’t talk about it. I let others talk about it. 

You know, you have strong opinions both ways on the vaccines. It's interesting. The Democrats love the vaccine. The Democrats. Only reason I don’t take credit for it. The Republicans, in many cases, don’t, although many of them got it, I can tell you. It’s very interesting. Some of the ones who talk the most. I said, “Well, you didn’t have it did you?” Well, actually he did, but you know, et cetera. 

But Democrats think it’s an incredible, incredible achievement, and they wish they could take credit for it, and Republicans don’t. I don't bring it up. All I do is just, I do the right thing. And we've gotten actually a lot of credit for Operation Warp Speed. And the power and the speed was incredible. And don’t forget, when I said, nobody had any idea what this was. You know, we’re two and a half years, almost three years, nobody ever. Everybody thought of a pandemic as an ancient problem. No longer a modern problem, right? You know, you don't think of that? You hear about 1917 in Europe and all. You didn’t think that could happen. You learned if you could. But nobody saw that coming and we took over, and I’m not blaming the past administrations at all, because again, nobody saw it coming. But the cupboards were bare. 

We had no gowns, we had no masks. We had no goggles, we had no medicines. We had no ventilators. We had nothing. The cupboards were totally bare. And I energized the country like nobody’s ever energized our country. A lot of people give us credit for that. Unfortunately, they’re mostly Democrats that give me the credit.

Well, sir, would you do the same thing again to get vaccines in the arms of Americans as quickly as possible, if it happened again in the next four years?

Trump: Well, there are the variations of it. I mean, you know, we also learned when that first came out, nobody had any idea what this was, this was something that nobody heard of. At that time, they didn’t call it Covid. They called it various names. Somehow they settled on Covid. It was the China virus, various other names. 

But when this came along, nobody had any idea. All they knew was dust coming in from China. And there were bad things happening in China around Wuhan. You know, I predicted. I think you'd know this, but I was very strong on saying that this came from Wuhan. And it came from the Wuhan labs. And I said that from day one. Because I saw things that led me to believe that, very strongly led me to believe that. But I was right on that. A lot of people say that now that Trump really did get it right. A lot of people said, “Oh, it came from caves, or it came from other countries.” China was trying to convince people that it came from Italy and France, you know, first Italy, then France. I said, “No, it came from China, and it came from the Wuhan labs.” And that's where it ended up coming from. So you know, and I said that very early. I never said anything else actually. But I've been given a lot of credit for Operation Warp Speed. But most of that credit has come from Democrats. And I think a big portion of Republicans agree with it, too. But a lot of them don't want to say it. They don't want to talk about it.

So last follow-up: The Biden Administration created the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, a permanent office in the executive branch tasked with preparing for epidemics that have not yet emerged. You disbanded a similar office in 2018 that Obama had created. Would you disband Biden's office, too?

Trump: Well, he wants to spend a lot of money on something that you don't know if it's gonna be 100 years or 50 years or 25 years. And it's just a way of giving out pork. And, yeah, I probably would, because I think we've learned a lot and we can mobilize, you know, we can mobilize. A lot of the things that you do and a lot of the equipment that you buy is obsolete when you get hit with something. And as far as medicines, you know, these medicines are very different depending on what strains, depending on what type of flu or virus it may be. You know, things change so much. So, yeah, I think I would. It doesn't mean that we're not watching out for it all the time. But it's very hard to predict what's coming because there are a lot of variations of these pandemics. I mean, the variations are incredible, if you look at it. But we did a great job with the therapeutics. And, again, these therapeutics were specific to this, not for something else. So, no, I think it's just another—I think it sounds good politically, but I think it's a very expensive solution to something that won't work. You have to move quickly when you see it happening.

link

Cool idea, thanks for working on it.

According to this article, only Deepmind gave the UK AI Institute (partial?) access to their model before release. This seems like a pro-social thing to do so maybe this could be worth tracking in some way if possible.