The Progress Open Thread is a place to share good news, big or small.

See this post for an explanation of why we have these threads.

What goes in a progress thread comment? 

Think of this as an org update thread for individuals. You might talk about...

• Securing a new job, internship, grant, or scholarship
• Starting or making progress on a personal project
• Helping someone else get involved in EA
• Making a donation you feel really excited about
• Taking the Giving What We Can pledge or signing up for Try Giving
• Writing something you liked outside the Forum (whether it's a paper you've submitted to a journal or just an insightful Facebook comment)
• Any of the above happening to someone else, if you think they'd be happy for you to share the news
• Other EA-related progress in the world (disease eradication, cage-free laws, cool new research papers, etc.)

Summary

• The Animal Welfare Fund, the Long-Term Future Fund, and the EA Infrastructure Fund (formerly the EA Meta Fund) are calling for applications.
• Applying is fast and easy – it typically takes less than a few hours. If you are unsure whether to apply, simply give it a try.
• The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now support anonymized grants: if you prefer not having your name listed in the public payout report, we are still interested in funding you.
• If you have a project you think will improve the world, and it seems like a good fit for one of our funds, we encourage you to apply by 7 March (11:59pm PST). Apply here. We’d be excited to hear from you!

Recent updates

• The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now officially support anonymized grants. To be transparent towards donors and the effective altruism community, we generally prefer to publish a report about

Hillary Greaves laid out a problem of "moral cluelessness" in her paper Cluelessness,  http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mert2255/papers/cluelessness.pdf

Primer on cluelesness

There are some resources on this problem below, taken from the Oxford EA Fellowship materials:

(Edit: one text deprecated and redacted)

Hilary Greaves on Cluelessness, 80000 Hours podcast (25 min) https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-global-priorities-institute/

If you value future people, why do you consider short-term effects? (20 min) https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ajZ8AxhEtny7Hhbv7/if-you-value-future-people-why-do-you-consider-near-term

Simplifying cluelessness (30 min) https://philiptrammell.com/static/simplifying_cluelessness.pdf

Finally there's this half hour talk of Greaves presenting her ideas around cluelessness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fySZIYi2goY

The complex cluelessness problem

Greaves has the following worry about complex cluelessness:

The cases in question have the following structure:

For some pair of actions of interest A1, A2, 

 - (CC1) We have some reasons to think that the unforeseeable consequences of A1 would systematically tend to be substantially better than those of A2; 

 - (CC2) We have some reasons to think that the unforeseeable consequences of A2 would systematically tend to be substantially better than those of A1; 

 - (CC3) It is unclear

Why are reading groups and journal clubs bad so often?

I think there are two reasons: boring readings and low-energy discussions. This post is about how to avoid those pitfalls.

The problem

I have participated in (and organized) some really bad reading groups. This is a shame, because I love a good reading group. They cause me to read more things and read them more carefully. A great group discussion will give me way more than I’d get just by taking notes on a reading.

This is what a bad reading group looks like: six people gather around a table. Two kind of skimmed the reading, and two didn’t read it at all. No one knows quite what to talk about. Someone ventures a, “so, what surprised you about the paper?” Another person flips through their notes, scanning for a possible answer. Most people stay quiet. No one leaves the table feeling excited about...

Presumably this information is public but spread out.

If you know how many hits an EA website got last year, please post it here.

Even better, a link to a public analytics site.

Edited by Jacy Reese Anthis. Many thanks to Ali Ladak, Tobias Baumann, Jack Malde, James Faville, Sophie Barton, Matt Allcock, and the staff at PETRL for reviewing and providing feedback.

SUMMARY

Artificial sentient beings could be created in vast numbers in the future. While their future could be bright, there are reasons to be concerned about widespread suffering among such entities. There is increasing interest in the moral consideration of artificial entities among academics, policy-makers, and activists, which suggests that we could have substantial leverage on the trajectory of research, discussion, and regulation if we act now. Research may help us assess which actions will most cost-effectively make progress. Tentatively, we argue that outreach on this topic should first focus on researchers and other stakeholders who have adjacent interests.

INTRODUCTION

Imagine that you develop a brain disease like Alzheimer’s, but that a cutting-edge treatment has been developed. Doctors replace the damaged neurons in your brain with computer chips that are...

[We the authors decided to put this paper up on the EA Forum as we believe it is highly relevant to global catastrophic risk and global priorities research. This a 'preprint' of the accepted for publication version. 

The journal Futures has provided 50 days' free access to the final, published version of the article. Anyone clicking on this link before March 24, 2021 will be taken directly to the article on Futures, which they are welcome to read or download. No sign up, registration or fees are required.  After March 24th, this is a permalink to the paper.]

Assessing Climate Change’s Contribution to Global Catastrophic Risk

Simon Beard,^[1],[2] Lauren Holt,¹ Shahar Avin,¹ Asaf Tzachor,^1,[3] Luke Kemp,^1,[4] Phil Torres,[5] and Haydn Belfield^1,[6]

Many have claimed that climate change is an imminent threat to humanity, but there is no way to verify such claims. This is concerning, especially given the prominence of some of these claims and the fact that...

Introduction

In sketch, the challenge of consequentialist cluelessness is the consequences of our actions ramify far into the future (and thus - at least at first glance - far beyond our epistemic access). Although we know little about them, we know enough to believe it unlikely these unknown consequences will neatly ‘cancel out’ to neutrality - indeed, they are likely to prove more significant than those we can assess. How, then, can we judge some actions to be better than others?

For example (which we shall return to), even if we can confidently predict the short-run impact of donations to the Against Malaria Foundation are better than donations to Make-a-Wish, the final consequences depend on a host of recondite matters (e.g. Does reducing child mortality increase or decrease population size? What effect does a larger population have on (among others) economic growth, scientific output, social stability? What effect do these have on...

We’re excited to announce the launch of Probably Good, a new organization that provides career guidance intended to help people do as much good as possible.

Context

For a while, we have felt that there was a need for a more generalist careers organization than 80,000 Hours — one which is more agnostic regarding different cause areas and might provide a different entry point into the community to people who aren’t a good fit for 80K’s priority areas. Following 80,000 Hours’ post about what they view as gaps in the careers space, we contacted them about how a new organization could effectively fill some of those gaps.

After a few months of planning, asking questions, writing content, and interviewing experts, we’re almost ready to go live (we aim to start putting our content online in 1-2 months) and would love to hear more from the community at large.

How You Can Help

The most important...