I hastily vibecoded a ~live-updating EA Forum (posts + comments; I think users are static) database + semantic search because software is ~free now. I haven't rigorously checked anything over because it was/is just a random side project so use at your own risk and discretion. Enjoy!
Full database is ~17GB
Hi!
I haven't been very active on the Forum recently, so I thought I'd just pop in to remind people that I offer various editing-related services as a freelancer.
I'm based in London, but most of my work is remote. I offer copyediting, proofreading, substantive editing, conceptual support, review, and coaching. I've worked with many individuals and organisations in the EA and AI safety worlds: for example, I copyedited METR's recent Frontier Risk Report and the International AI Safety Report (2025 and 2026).
If you'd like to work with me, book a short meeting or email me at [email protected].
I think EAG/EAGx conferences should try (if possible) to avoid venues under active corporate campaign targeting for animal welfare failures.
I recently went to a protest against Marriott over their unfulfilled cage-free egg commitment and couldn't help but think back to EAGxDC which was held at one of their hotels in May.
I don't think the EAGxDC organizers intentionally ignored this; they probably didn't know, or the venue was just very logistically convenient (which I think outweighs this concern).
But I wonder whether organizers generally consider this when choosing venues. I feel like they should, assuming there are other options not under campaign targeting.
On LessWrong, the disagree button is on the left and the agree button is on the right. On EAF, the agree button is on the left and the disagree button is on the right.
Re Luna amendment, there was an additional Luna amendment that was trying to remove the SOB provision that died (even though the pesticide one went through). That was what I was referring to. https://www.nationalhogfarmer.com/farming-business-management/amendment-to-strike-down-save-our-bacon-act-rejected
You're right about 2, fixed. I didn't see the comment pointing this out as I don't check comments on posts more than a day after posting (otherwise I'd have way too many to check as I get a lot of comments).
Re 3, Didn’t mean to use the word PAC in the comment, was an error (not sure if I was confused at time or just a typo.). But the ampa themselves—not the PAC—are the things the donation link was to, and they’re just defeating sob. Other stuff the PAC is doing is also to defeat SOB (Craig is a big opponent of it).
Effective altruists advocate giving your money to where it does most good. The leading areas EAs recommend donating to are making the long-term future go better, animal welfare, global health, and growing the effective altruism movement. Yet there’s been surprisingly little comparison between these cause areas. Here, I’ll explain my ranking: why I think it’s best to donate to Longtermist organizations or organizations focused on growing EA. I’ll also explain why I think animal welfare is bett...
I figured this was important to keep separate:
I DO believe that preventing extinction is valuable and there are some projects promising enough to prioritize over work in other cause areas.
I DON'T believe that longtermism dominates all other cause areas in expectation, or that the argument you have made in favor of longtermism is convincing.
This seems to me to be another instance of the 1% fallacy (or the 0.1% fallacy, or the 10^-18 fallacy).
In your post, you talk about being skeptical of arguments where infinities cancel. I would argue that uncanceled infinities are generally a sign of a model being applied beyond its range of efficacy.
If you start off with a rough model and extrapolate it out to get a big enough number, all you have to do is come up with a set of conditions under which that number could plausibly be achieved, no matter how improbable. Then, say "Zero isn't a probability, and you don't have enough evidence to show that the probability cancels my big number." from the start and suddenly you have a large expected value.
However, when you refine the model (considering higher order effects, more thoroughly treating counterfactuals, turning exponential curves into more accurate s-curves), the big number drops out.
The base rate for the infinite is 0. As a result, I am much more skeptical of models where infinities don't cancel.
Could you please provide any concrete grounding for the probability of counterfactually shifting from extinction to a vast future (not delaying extinction temporarily) that is not based on a very small subjectively "conservative" probability?
To see this, let’s be generous and say the expected number of future well-off people added by preventing an existential catastrophe is only 10^40
I think your argumentation supports the 10^40 number more than the "well-off" claim. I'd be interested in you responding to things like On the sign of X-risk reduction.
Hey Vasco, always nice to hear from you!
By growing EA, you mean growing longtermist EA? What makes a donation or career longtermist? If you think the longterm benefits of decreasing the risk of human extinction over the next few 10 years are much larger than its nearterm benefits, you should also think the longterm benefits of animal welfare and global health interventions are much larger than their nearterm benefits?
I think most efforts to grow EA grow both Longtermist and non-Longtermist elements of EA. I do agree though that the Longtermist effects of animal welfare are much bigger than near-term benefits.
If so, how do you compare the longterm benefits in a principled way? You estimated "each dollar [donated to longtermist interventions] increases the number of well-off future people in expectation by 10^26", and GiveWell's top charities save around 2*10^-4 lives per $ (= 1/(5*10^3)). However, I assume your best guess for the reduction in existential risks would not have to be less than 2*10^-30 (2*10^-4/10^26) times as high, i.e. less than 2*10^-32 pp (instead of your assumption of 0.01 pp), for you to prioritise global health over longtermist interventions.
Yeah, it's rough and there's not a perfect method. You just need to use your best judgment. Taking into account moral uncertainty + interchangeability of money, I wouldn't be that extreme, but I have some credence that something like that extreme of a tradeoff is right.
Are you aware of any quantitative model suggesting this?
Don't think we need one for those sorts of things, just like we don't need a quantitative model suggesting, say, the odds of Vance being the next president are around 30%.
GWWC estimated their giving multiplier in 2025 was 7. You linked to an analysis I did of their giving multiplier in 2023-2024. GWWC estimated this was 6, and I got values of 8 to 9.
Oops, dumb, will fix.
I think we've talked elsewhere about why I don't buy that soil nematodes etc make us totally clueless about which animal welfare interventions are good.
This is a linkpost for Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp by Adam Elga, which was originally published in Philosophers' Imprint in May 2010. Here is an errata for it. Below is a summary...
Why does Parfit's hitchhiker pose a problem?
Because the same kind of solution is available to someone with unsharp probabilities in Elga's scenario, if you're treating them fairly.
The St. Petersburg paradox involves an infinite expected payoff, and I reject infinite worlds.
It doesn't require an infinite world, only that you can't be 100% confident in any finite upper bound on your impact that you specify, and that there are infinitely many ways that the world could be (due largely to not full certainty about physics).
(But also 0% to infinite worlds seems epistemically immodest, doesn't treat the evidence on each side fairly, and is poorly argued, imo. But I don’t want to rehash this.)
In Sally's case, her money is the only thing that matters.
Why can't the fact that she'd pick a dominated sequence or regret it if she rejects both bets matter to her after rejecting bet A?
I understand one should accept bet A based on that strategy. However, unsharp probabilities are supposed to allow for accepting or rejecting A?
They don't have to in every case. If it was A in isolation, and no other decisions, then yes, both rejecting and accepting should be permissible. But that's not the case presented to us.
I agree that rejecting both A and B would not make sense, if you are informed of both. I think the author is wrong to treat A and B as separate decisions, when the agent knows about both in advance.
Knowing that you have the option to take bet B later fundamentally changes the considerations for bet A. As a result, we are not making 2 independent decisions (A: yes or no, and B: yes or no). We are making 4 (A, B, BOTH, NEITHER).
When considering that list, we can see that BOTH is strictly greater than NEITHER in all worlds and rule out NEITHER. We are left with A, B, and BOTH to choose from, all of which might make sense depending on the agent's choices.
At no point did I need to employ NARROW, PLAN, or SEQUENCE. I didn't even consider the probability of H, let alone whether that probability is sharp. I just considered the available options differently.
EDIT: I think this is close in effect to SEQUENCE. As a result, there might be the objection, "What if, of the 4 options, you choose B? Could you change your mind after rejecting A and then reject B as well?" To this I would say that a rational actor does not change their mind without new information. They would only choose B if they believe B > BOTH > NEITHER. Any rational actor who believes B > NEITHER would end up betting B. They would never bet NEITHER.
What might have muddied the waters:
I separately considered how I might deal with these probabilities separately, WITHOUT knowledge that one will follow the other. This is a distinct problem from the original dilemma. However, I think it's the only situation where a rational actor who follows UNSHARP might behave differently.
Without knowledge beforehand, if you hold UNSHARP, the following can happen:
You receive A, evaluate it, conclude it's optional due to UNSHARP probabilities, and reject it. Then, you are offered B, evaluate it, conclude it's optional, and reject it. You look back and think "I wish I would have known beforehand. I would have taken advantage of the arbitrage. Oh well. I guess rational actors with less information make worse decisions."
I think it is rational for an actor to hold unsharp probabilities for some hypotheses.[1] I think it's rational to not engage in sports gambling when no arbitrage exists. My initial example was designed to connect the two.
I haven't made my mind up on whether it's necessary to hold unsharp probabilities in theory but I'm much more confident in practice.
When you see a new opportunity that you know very little about that might be massively valuable, using your minimally informed baseline model to direct action seems irresponsible. Upon further investigation, everything regresses to the mean.
In the sports gambling example I gave, you should reject unless you see arbitrage because ~all available information is priced in. In the case of impact, new opportunities look more exciting than reality due to (e.g.) selection effects and stable equilibria.
This discussion of whether or not we should have unsharp probabilities is beside the point. My argument is about whether we can have unsharp probabilities without sacrificing rationality. I believe we can.
Hi Anthony. Thanks. I followed up on LessWrong.
Note: This post was crossposted from Good Bones by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
But we get the job done
I was twenty one when I joined Open Phil,...
Just to note that having cycles of ups and downs in life is completely normal, and more even so when one is young, but in case these cycles are associated with significant psychological suffering, it's important to seek psychological help. Here's some resources I personally have found useful:
Although Acceptance and Commitment Therapy seems to me the most adequate for the sort of feeling this post describes, but I don't know any free resource.
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
To recap, first, we face an epistemic challenge beyond uncertainty over possible futures. Due to unawareness, we can’t conceive of many relevant futures in the first place, which makes the standard EV framework ill-suited for impartial altruistic decision-making. And...
In the details of the case study (3.3.2), why did you choose to model (edit: or more precisely guess) Δp(Other), rather than Δp(Malevolent)?
It's worth noting that AI companies explicitly train their models to claim that they have no subjective experience. So the fact that they claim it isn't really evidence of whether it's true or not.
That's an interesting perspective. However, the internal persona the model adopts is a different area from the one I was exploring. My focus was whether pleasantries affect output quality and how to elevate prompts to be more efficient, all while preserving tokens.
That said, what happens inside is worth exploring separately. Do you have an article to suggest?
We announced the Cluelessness Critiques Competition two weeks ago.
A lot of you, not only prospective entrants, will have been reading Anthony's sequence where he lays out his unawareness argument, or following the comments on ...
Anthony cites Greaves and MacAskill giving an example similar to your gunpowder one:
Consider, for example, would-be longtermists in the Middle Ages. It is plausible that the considerations most relevant to their decision – such as the benefits of science, and therefore the enormous value of efforts to help make the scientific and industrial revolutions happen sooner – would not have been on their radar. Rather, they might instead have backed attempts to spread Christianity, perhaps by violence: a putative route to value that, by our more enlightened lights today, looks wildly off the mark. The suggestion, then, is that our current predicament is relevantly similar to that of our medieval would-be longtermists.
I personally think these examples are less compelling than they first appear (e.g. the persistence literature generally finds weaker effects than what you might imagine), but I agree that a failure of EAs to find examples of sign flips doesn't mean that future ones won't exist.
Interesting, that's helpful to know.
Not a comprehensive reply, but: I think many of the examples you're talking about are arguably cases of coarse awareness. People were coarsely aware of the potential backfire risks earlier on, but (arguably) the reason they didn't give these risks enough weight was that they didn't have a more fine-grained awareness of the specific causal pathways. I think such cases count as evidence for the pessimistic induction.
Good question! I think "other theoretically possible aggregations of all or most of the possible consequences of A and B" would also suffice, yeah. (Of course, if we ourselves can't specify what this alternative is, we have our work cut out for us if we're gonna argue that we should expect our idealized self to prefer A over B on this basis.)
I mean that we have what I call "coarse awareness" here: we conceive of crude groups of possible worlds, rather than possible worlds specified in fine-grained enough detail to assign them precise values (wrt impartial altruist axiologies). See also here for some examples. Happy to unpack more if those sections don't answer things!
I wonder how likely Canada is to join the US (whether through voluntary accession or forced annexation, or some other means), during an intelligence explosion. Very rough thoughts:
- Normal political base rates make this seem very low-probability. But the world where this is seriously entertained would very likely be far from "normal"
- If the US gains a permanent lead (not necessarily even a full DSA that could disable nuclear second-strike capability) over other AI-relevant countries, Canada might become much more strategically valuable because of land, water, energy, minerals, easier cooling for data centres, etc.
- The US might want Canada inside its security perimeter for many other reasons too.
- Canada would probably have very weak bargaining power if the US is far in the lead.
- But the US could probably get most benefits through softer, less extreme forms of integration?
So I’d guess: annexation very unlikely, accession unlikely but possible, de facto integration much more likely. I'm trying to think through what this would imply for whether Canadian citizenship would matter (e.g. if somehow there's windfall clause related reason or similar benefits/opportunities).
Edit: clearly AI-2040 answered the question of what would happen to Canada! (joke)
I argue that evidence for moral realism is possible and findable. The purpose of this post is to refute an objection to moral uncertainty that I often hear: "What if I think objective morality doesn't exist?" I argue that to reject moral uncertainty, one needs to believe there could never be any evidence for moral realism, and so I show that there could be — through three counterpossibilities.
I then argue that since evidence for moral realism could exist...
Basically, if the creator has good justification for their belief, they should be able to give you that justification. If they can't, then why does their belief mean anything?
From a Bayesian perspective: if I hold credence P in X, and the creator says their credence is 100%, I update toward them because they are more reliable. Same way I'd move toward "vaccines work" if I were agnostic and learned that 90% of scientists believe they do (i.e. I don't need to see each [or any] scientist's reasoning/evidence to update toward their view). So the creator's belief can be evidence via reliability.
I agree that if the creator believes X there's some evidence for X somewhere; I just don't think that evidence has to be revealed for me to update. (Note: Scientists have a track record and the creator doesn't, but it's not the track record itself that makes me update, it's reliability; for scientists I get reliability via their track record, and for the creator it's a medium-confidence assumption [less-defensible, I know])
Also, "if they can't give you the justification" assumes silence = inability. A creator stating a belief without the reasoning/evidence doesn't mean they can't do so, just that they didn't. Besides, maybe they can't communicate; does that mean there is nothing to communicate? I don't think so. Either way (or other ways I can't think of, beyond choosing not to and not being able to communicate), I think learning about the creator's belief warrants an update.
On 1, I'm not sure I understand why moral intuitions wouldn't change in a CEV. Why would intutions not be partly downstream of cognitive capacity? (Also: this is probably cherry-picking (Googled the question), but people with higher cognitive (verabl) abilities seem to have weaker "purity"-based moral intutions.)
Also, it’s not just the intuitions themselves that could change, but the confidence in them. Our intuitions (esp. when taken to their logical conclusions) contradict each other a lot; however, when doing moral philosophy, we often prioritize the higher-confidence one (e.g., my intuition that harming someone with no benefit to any is bad, beats my intuition that murderers deserve punishment). Confidence seems to vary between people (anecdotally), so if we were to scale up cognitively, I imagine that the intuitions we think will win could change.
On 2, I agree. Didn't think of this.
In four days (July 11, 12-4pm), about ~200 of us (event link), including 13 different groups, will be marching on OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in SF asking the CEOs to commit to stop developing more powerful models if every other major AI company (and China) does the same. We're calling this The AI Protest (theprotest.ai).
We're gonna have some of the speakers from last time (Nate Soares (MIRI), David Krueger (Evitable), Will Fithian (Berkeley Professor)) but also try to get folks from different groups part of the coalition speaking too.
As Scott Alexander puts it: "Participants are about half from our conspiracy and half from random anti-data-center-type groups, which I think is how this basically has to work, so don’t be surprised if you run into the latter."
On why we're doing this, see: