To EAs, "development economics" evokes the image of RCTs on psychotherapy or deworming. That is, after all, the closest interaction between EA and development economists. However, this characterization has prompted some pushback, in the form of the argument that all global...
Next week for the 80,000 Hours Podcast I'll be interviewing Carl Shulman, advisor to Open Philanthropy, and generally super informed person about history, technology, possible futures, and a shocking number of other topics.
He has previously appeared on our show and the ...
“Association of Animal and Plant Protein Intake With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality”
Study authors found that substituting 3 percent of daily calories from animal protein with plant protein was associated with a lower risk for death from all causes: a 34 percent ...
Thanks for sharing this research! As far as I know it concords well with other research showing plant-based proteins are at least as healthy as animal-based ones, if not moreso. Plant proteins also come with much less suffering of conscious beings* than animal proteins do, which seems to make them the most moral option for people looking to eat ethically.
*not only the animals brutalized in factory farms, but also the human workers pushed into such jobs by economic desperation
Are we too willing to accept forecasts from experts on the probability of humanity’s demise at the hands of artificial intelligence? What degree of individual liberty should we curtail in the name of AI risk mitigation? I argue that focusing on AI’s existential risk distracts...
Welcome to the EA Forum, and thanks for the post, Zed!
Differing national levels in risk tolerance may explain the gap between public opinion on, for example, genetic engineering between the United States and Europe.
The link you have here is broken.
This is the summary of the report with additional images (and some new text to explain them) The full 90+ page report (and a link to its 80+ page appendix) is on our website.
This report forms part of our work to conduct cost-effectiveness analyses ...
So the problem I had in mind was in the parenthetical in my paragraph:
To its credit, the write-up does highlight this, but does not seem to appreciate the implications are crazy: any PT intervention, so long as it is cheap enough, should be thought better than GD, even if studies upon it show very low effect size (which would usually be reported as a negative result, as almost any study in this field would be underpowered to detect effects as low as are being stipulated)
To elaborate: the actual data on Strongminds was a n~250 study by Bolton et al. 2003 th...
tl;dr: This document contains a list of forecasting questions, commissioned by Open Philanthropy as part of its aim to have more accurate models of future AI progress. Many of these questions are more classic forecasting questions, others have the same shape but are unresolvable...
Nice work!
In this adjacent document, we also outline a "resolution council"
The link points to this post.
I guess the fact that no country in history has gotten rich while being agrarian gives me a very strong prior against it. And there are clear reasons why; agricultural goods are commodities that are extremely cheap, so even having an advantage in them, you can only have a slim advantage. Plus different countries will always have different comparative advantages in different crops. Compare that to manufacturing where you can make increasingly specialized and high-quality goods that generate much more profits.
My impression is that underutilization of labor i... (read more)