The new EA Forum frontpage layout is unserious. My concern is simple: where is the list of the latest posts? The screen is so overwhelmed by "featured posts" and "comments" and "quick takes" that the centerpiece of the whole thing is completely gone. Now I can't see what is going on in EA, or whether there is something that I want to read, which defeats the point of visiting the website. And moreover, hiding such key information gives the appearance of a forum that doesn't care about supporting serious discussion, it sets the wrong tone for the community.

You can see a comparison to LessWrong and Hacker News below.

Current EA forum

Current Lesswrong

Current Hacker News

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I found a few more EA-aligned animal welfare organizations that appear eligible based on Every.org's official criteria:

• EA Animal Welfare Fund
• The Humane League
• Wild Animal Initiative
• Fish Welfare Initiative
• Animal Ethics
• Mercy For Animals

Quick reflections from EAG NYC:

1. People in econ academia are worried about the lack of urgency and adaptability amongst peers who hopped on the econ of AI bandwagon, and think there is an overemphasis of empirical work and causal inference on marginal problems (like productivity gains) to impress other economists. Economists aren't rewarded for trying to answer ill defined but important / ambitious / longterm questions about AI e.g. gradual disempowerment, post-labour.
2. Some technical AI safety people are disillusioned with mech interp and are trying to work in AI policy because they think this is the going to move the needle most now.
3. 1-1 system using the new Swapcard matcher is great, very low friction way to meet specific people where you know there's a high chance the conversation will be very fruitful.
4. The number and quality of my match requests were starkly higher from EAG London a few months ago, almost certainly due to MATS being on my profile.
5. I've gotten to the stage where now undergrads match with me for advice (I'm no longer the student!), and they're confused about what to do. I tell them is to remain relentlessly curious but I have no good advice for what the world looks like in 3 years.
6. People are increasingly supportive of when I say I put off PhD plans partially due to shorter timelines.
7. People don't have a good pitch to explain gradual disempowerment risks to their non AGI-pilled friends, as it's fuzzier/less obvious than misuse and misalignment. They seemed to like the cattle analogy I overuse.
8. Fellowship hopping beyond 2 fellowships is seen as an anti-signal in the AI safety space.

I think there's been a lot of goalpost shifting around weak and strong instrumental convergence arguments. 

The original formulation of Instrumental convergence, by people arguing for AI doom, was that every sufficiently intelligent AI agent would become a fanatical meglomaniac that destroyed humanity in order to achieve inscrutable, alien goals. 

Today, we have an ungodly number of fairly capable AI agents that are just being let loose, often unsupervised on the open internet. What percentage of these are wannabe meglomaniac world-conquerers? It looks like "almost zero" to me, although it's certainly concerning that it may not be exactly zero. 

At what level of capability is this mythical hard left turn towards meglomania meant to suddenly show up simultaneously in all these AI's, which all seem to be doing wildly different things and acting in wildly different ways? Do you think AI doomers in 2015 would have predicted this to occur before or after AI starting cracking Millenium prize problems? It seems to me like the doomer version of IC is not only falsifiable, it's quickly being falsified in front of our very eyes. 

I've started a living literature review on the relationship between wealth and wellbeing.

Things I've done some work on that I plan to publish more on that seem relevant to some EA conversations in global health and wellbeing :

• Does each doubling have the same return to wellbeing? The convention (outside of time discounts) is to assume that going from $500 to $1000 is the same return on wellbeing as $500k to $1,000k. I think that's probably not true. This affects how we think about improving incomes in high versus low income countries.
• How effective are cash transfers in high income countries? So far, it seems like cash transfers that improve annual income by 10-30% in the USA have pretty much no effect on wellbeing. Weird. Not sure why yet. Seems bearish for UBI, but I'm not quite sure what's a better idea yet.
• Does economic growth make countries happier? Richer countries are happier, richer people are happier, and people getting richer are happier, but countries getting richer has reportedly been a more mixed blessing for people. I expect to find something like growth is probably good but less good than you would expect based on looking at country cross sections. However, it's possible there's some weird scale use stuff that'd make growth look growth look like a miracle for human wellbeing.
• If not growth in incomes, then what? I'll look at what if any reliable predictors there are of increases to national wellbeing -- an area I feel like we know surprisingly little about. There's some work suggesting that increases to social capital and social spending are better predictors than economic growth. Something like social capital seems plausible but social spending seems likelier to be confounded by the requirement that you need to make money to spend money (on welfare systems). But there's some evidence that trust and social capital is increased in societies that experience high growth, so it's all a bit messy. 

Some less relevant things I'll work on: what does the causal evidence say about social media and mental wellbeing? -- it's somewhat bad, probably. How happy were our ancestors? -- Either about as happy as we are or, or as happy as people are in Afghanistan -- Which is to say teetering on the cusp of having negative wellbeing on average. Not sure which yet. Is it the psychology, stupid? I'm also curious to understand the psychology of populism, and if a non-material lens gives us a better sense of how to predict and maybe prevent populist driven destablization to the institutions we'll need to preserve to have any chance at governing during these wacky next few decades. 

It may well correlate but as Heather Browing puts it we are just "trading intutions". Values "vary widely from 0.56 to 6.05" and the only comparable low income group from IDinsight Beneficiary Preferences Survey puts it at 0.56. Revealed preferences go against this as well with suicide rate in Afghanistan lower than the global average (Although that is a bad measure it alot of ways)

Often its just worth considering that EA Wild Animal folks are massively skewed in their moral weights for suffering often to basically weighting positive experiences at near zero. AIM has some data comparing Excruciating pain to Annoying between community surveys and the literature. For the literature showing trade off people would make the ratio is more like 1 : 30 while the comunity survey is 1 : 4.5 million and Anima international folks are even more skewed at 1 : 200 million. So much of the discussion is coming from a group with very different prefences to the general population. And we don't even know what non-humans would say about this!

At 1 : 30 and a death by predation of a minute even a relatively short life can look overall worth living, at 1 :200 million for the same death even a life of 300 years looks net negative.

So a normal trade offs of pain severity, positive experiences and other goods freedom may go to explain the assocation between animal rights and pro-rewilding