Hi! This has been in my backlog, so I wanted to quickly post about a one-on-one app that we made a couple of months ago for the West Coast EA Retreat and Midwest EA Retreat.
Pairwise is a simple scheduler for 1:1s at retreats and other events. You can sign in with a magic link, mark the slots you're free, browse other attendees and see when your availability overlaps, and request meetings.
You can try a demo retreat here and read about its use at the West Coast EA retreat here.
If you want to use pairwise for an EA or AI safety or similar retreat/event, please let me know! You can email [email protected] or DM me.
Made by Jesse Gilbert with help from Saul Munn. Open source on GitHub.
Is there a way for me to filter posts below say 15 karma from my frontage? I couldn’t easily find it on mobile.
I'm currently drafting a post on current sycophantic AI as something that threatens core human skills of reasoning, maths etc. Based on aviation skills fade and recent possible impact on CS outcomes. This could have knock on impacts to other causes as degraded skills might lead to degraded outcomes in fields like AI alignment or ethical reasoning in time.
I would appreciate some human collaboration on it. I don't have huge amount of time (so it is AI written currently, ironically, but writing ITN notes isn't my cue competency anyway).
I've been mulling over this quote from Naomi Klein over the last couple of days. I think its a strong summary of one of the best ethical arguments against the top AI labs.
My argument against this might be that the actual purpose of commercial application is to improve human wellbeing and prosperity overall, not to eliminate jobs. Jobs may or may not be eliminated, but either option could be fine if the prosperity is shared (at least somewhat) throughout humanity.
Then there are orgs like Mechanize, which are explicitly trying to eliminate jobs...
Besides that on the "theft" of creativity front, I think this is broadly true but I'm not sure what can be done at this point. To generalise (even with coding) AI feeds of the best that humanity has to offer then produces worse-than-the-best output much faster, at a fraction of the cost. Without the best of human IP, AI wouldn't be very good. Newer models may be starting to be better than the best humans in niche areas, but this isn't the norm.
I talk a lot about how AI helps us provide healthcare to some of the poorest people, but I still don't have the greatest response to these kind of criticisms from many of my friends. I wonder how others respond to people when they bring arguments like this?
cart;horse: If you are in the Bay Area on July 11th, even if you're at a company being protested, you should come to The AI Protest. It's fully legal and nonviolent (we'll have a full overtime SFPD escort the entire time), and it's not the worst way you can use your Saturday afternoon that weekend. Plus all of your coolest friends will be there.
There's a lot of discussion about the effectiveness of protests and marches;...
I was recently at “Skoll”, the biggest NGO/social entrepreneurship conference. From one conversation to the next, two topics popped up over and over……. and over
1. Scale, Scale, Scale
2. Scale through Government, Government, Government
We at OneDay Health grapple with these questions: how then Shall we scale? And shall we through Government? Right now we operate 88 one-nurse hea...
Suffering-focused ethics (SFE) is a family of moral views that gives special priority to reducing suffering. As you might know, we at the Center for Reducing Suffering find SFE deeply compelling—it is, after all, the backbone of our work. Part of our mission is to research and build a field around SFE. Unfortunately, SFE remains highly neglected in both academia and broader moral discourse. We are hoping to fill this...
(For context, I’m an undergraduate considering entering the hard-tech startup space. One concern I have is whether some of these startups are highly inevitable, and therefore whether my marginal impact as a founder would be essentially negligible.)
Question: For hard-tech startups that do not require extremely sophisticated technology, if the first inventor had not existed, how much later would someone else likely have done something similar?
By “hard tech that do...
I used AI to assist in writing this post, but I’ve rewritten it extensively and endorse it.
I'm excited to see this happen! Some welfare tech ideas seem really promising, and I think this is clearly a promising project — it's great that it's happening.
My biggest areas of uncertainty about welfare tech (which overlap with some you flagged and some of which apply to only some technologies):
Thanks so much for doing this! Seems like a great thing to try, and exciting to see the technology that will come out of it!
Hi Eitan. Thanks for sharing. I am enthusiastic about this initiative.
Its impact is more direct — same animals, better lives. Many animal-welfare interventions can be contested based on their indirect or secondary effects, such as how a diet shift ripples through wild-animal populations, say, or whether a reform just moves production elsewhere. Welfare Tech is comparatively straightforward: it improves the lives of animals already being farmed anyway.
I think interventions improving the lives of farmed animals may increase or decrease the welfare of soil invertebrates much more than they increase the welfare of farmed animals.
I see no escape from the uncertainty about the effects on soil invertebrates if one wants to increase welfare while accounting for all animals. I am not aware of any intervention supported by impact-focussed funders with effects on soil invertebrates robustly smaller than those on the target beneficiaries. Not saving human lives, not decreasing the consumption of animal foods or ingredients, not replacing fast with slower growth chicken, not replacing layers in battery cages with ones in cage-free aviaries or barns, not replacing standard with bird-safe glass, not replacing rodenticide with fertility control bait, and not even electrically stunning farmed shrimps.
It’s cost-effective, and the economics compound. Take shrimp stunners, estimated to help on the order of 1,400–1,500 shrimp per dollar per year.5 On a welfare-adjusted basis, some analyses (admittedly controversial) found it arguably ~100× more cost-effective than cage-free corporate campaigns, which are estimated at 9–120 chicken-years per dollar. Those multiples lean on moral-weight assumptions for shrimp and pain during death; but even discounted, they’re remarkable.
5. Vasco Grilo, “Cost-effectiveness of Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative,” EA Forum, 6 Oct 2024: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EbQysXxofbSqkbAiT; and the 2025 ACE review of SWP. The ≈100× multiple relies on Rethink Priorities’ median shrimp welfare range (~3% of a human’s).
It would be better to argue for high cost-effectiveness comparing interventions targeting similar species (with one intervention involving welfare tech)? Otherwise, the results of the comparisons will be influenced a lot by the uncertainty in welfare comparisons across species. I estimated the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) has increased the welfare of shrimps 139 times as cost-effectively as cage-free egg corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens. However, for sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to "individual number of neurons"^"exponent", and "exponent" from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable, I calculate that HSI has increased the welfare of shrimps 2.26*10^-4 to 1.49 k times as cost-effectively as cage-free egg corporate campaigns. In other words, I have practically no idea about which interventions increases the welfare of their target beneficiries more cost-effectively. Below is a graph with the results for "exponent" from 0 to 2.
A moral public good is something many people want to exist for moral reasons—for example, people might value poverty reduction in distant countries or an end to factory farming.
If future people care somewhat about moral public goods, but care more about idiosyncratic selfish goods, then there may be significant gains from them coordinating to fund moral public goods. Even though it’s in each individual's personal interests to fund selfish goods, everyone is...
Re: The appendix on assurance contract.
Whether the threshold is met in each case depends on the number of other signatories. Let’s call the number of other signatories XX, where X∼Binomial(N−1,p)X∼Binomial(N−1,p). Then:
Pr(X≥qN−1)∗(mqN−1)=Pr(X≥qN)∗(mqN)Pr(X≥qN−1)∗(mqN−1)=Pr(X≥qN)∗(mqN)
Or, equivalently: Pr[X=qN−1]∗(mqN−1)=Pr[X≥qN]Pr[X=qN−1]∗(mqN−1)=Pr[X≥qN]
There’s not a general closed form for pp, so we used numerical methods to find values for pp and the probability that the threshold number of signatories is reached given different values for NN and mm.
You solved for the solution of your equation numerically, but I think a decent analytical proxy would probably be that the good gets funded if m*sqrt(N)>1.
The analytical intuition is:
And it seems to roughly match the graph.
We make the case for training AIs to be risk-averse in resources — specifically, to treat resources as having diminishing marginal utility. These AIs would (for example) choose $40 for sure over a half-chance of $100 and a half-chance of $0. We argue that risk aversion can preserve AIs’ usefulness in the event that they turn out aligned, and that it provides an extra line of defense in the event that AIs turn out misaligned: misaligned but risk-averse AIs would prefer a highe...
As I understand the term, that sort of ASI wouldn't be considered "misaligned", it would be "aligned, but to the wrong target". I think of misalignment as when you wanted the ASI to do one thing, but it did something else instead.
There’s been an interesting discussion this week in the "animals" channel of the Ambitious Impact Sl...
This is the second post in my series on having kids as an EA. You can find the first here.
This post is a link to my Substack post about when to have kids. The title gives it away: I argue that a lot of impact-oriented folks who want to have children should consider having them sooner than they'd probably do otherwise.
Enjoy!
Edit: On my screen it says "this is a linkpost" and links to t...
I'm excited to see this happen! Some welfare tech ideas seem really promising, and I think this is clearly a promising project — it's great that it's happening.
My biggest areas of uncertainty about welfare tech (which overlap with some you flagged and some of which apply to only some technologies):
Thanks so much for doing this! Seems like a great thing to try, and exciting to see the technology that will come out of it!
I was never accepted into the Charity Entrepreneurship programme, but I was able to land a high-impact role at one (now leading it!), by getting in touch with other founders. For me, this is no less rewarding than being the real founder, and enough people treat me as if I went through the programme that it’s usually a surprise to people that I didn’t.
So I would urge some people to reconsider if founding is exactly what you want, you may be able to derive almost all of the benefits via a slightly different path, and CE’s charities would very much welcome talented founder-type generalists in high-level leadership & ownership roles!
For those reading this post: PauseAI UK is currently fundraising for operational expansion. If you want to donate to PauseAI UK, you can see their donor prospectus and make donations at https://pauseai.uk/donate
Please list any new funding opportunities you can think of here on the Forum? I feel like we might already be in the early ramp-up to significantly more EA aligned funding. At the same time, the Forum's overview over funding opportunities feels like it is quickly getting outdated. I think as things move quickly, coordination might become looser and new promising interventions are identified, it is helpful for people to have a good overview over available funding sources and their priorities.
I have heard on the grapevine there is already funding on several fronts that might not be very public. I am a little bit uncertain if perhaps it is better these sources remain anonymous. At the same time, I think there might be several promising EA projects that are not sufficiently visible to people influencing funding decisions.
Epistemic note: I am not listing these yet as I have not had time yet to verify how much they qualify as EA funding opportunities.
Here are a few recent developments I am considering listing on the funding opportunities page, but would like someone that knows these funds better to list them: