AI safety needs people everywhere but quickly stated, current talent bottlenecks to me look like:

-- Founders

-- Grantmakers

-- (technical) Research leads 

-- Policy entrepreneurs and implementors (which includes a lot of technical work)

-- bets in international coordination and/or cooperation

-- All manner of supporting talent -- program leads, ops proper, public outreach, content creators, comms

Most sought-after qualities for talent are:

-- context, mission alignment, domain understanding, sophisticated views on AI strategy and threat modelling etc.

-- "good judgement", "sound epistemics", "reasoning transparency" and other similar ideas/meta-skills from the EA/rationalist cannon

-- a willingness to get shit done/bias for action (rather than be in learning mode, or people who need a lot of management and oversight, or folks with too many preferences/constraints)

-- low ego, similar to above

-- ambitious folks, since they would be really trying to be their own managers, take on bigger projects, grow themselves and their teams etc. 

Finally, even having these, it's not enough to just claim to have these; job-seekers mainly trip up in being able to demonstrate and be legible about having them.

This resonates with me, thanks for sharing. 

I suspect you're a lot less alone on this one than you are with donating to effective charities and were being early to COVID. (I also suspect you agree, but spelling this out for other readers).

It's tricky to get meaningful information from surveys, but this one from June finds that a slight majority of respondents thought a superintelligence would seek to take control of humanity. AI existential risk awareness is also steadily climbing, this survey says up to 34%. I would bet that still only a very small % of people are as worried as you and me and many in this community, but lots of people are somewhat worried and could probably quite quickly get more worried and be activated to do something about it.

I think this points to saying what we're worried about, and saying it clearly (like this!), especially how quickly loss of control risks are becoming very real. I'm very bullish on AI safety comms, and expect there's lots we can do there.

Is it harmful to keep your money in index funds? Let's take a random index fund like FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund. If we look at the companies it actually invests in, a lot of them are the same companies that work towards advancing the AI. 

It would be ironic for some of us to be in favour of pausing AI and invest money into it at the same time. I used to keep some of my money in such funds because that was always the financial advice for regular folk like me who don't know/think much about investments. But now I don't know what to do because this feels bad. I switch some of my funds to FTSE Developed Europe ex U.K. Equity Index Fund because that has maybe twice less investment into AI but that still feels not great. Any advice for me?

Edit: I think I want advice not only about where to invest (which is appreciated), but also whether it's the right way to think about it. Maybe it doesn't matter what I invest in because something something efficient markets, but I think this doesn't apply to AI hype? Or would I offset my investment by a relatively small donation to AI safety efforts? Or maybe not because it's often not even clear if those are net-positive...

Hi Vasco, 
Thanks for the question and sorry for the slow reply. 

The overall process was to combine two estimates of THL's cost-effectiveness through weighting them in a Guesstimate model, along with some assumptions about the speed-up time of the intervention and the marginal cost-effectiveness relative to the past average cost-effectiveness. 
The more detailed steps were: 
1. Gather two estimates: THL review by ACE from 2025, wherein cage-free work has an estimated 2 to 44 hens affected per dollar (best guess of 11); THL self-published report from 2025, which reports 2 hens freed per dollar spent between 2015 and 2024. 
2. Make assumptions: The THL self-published report was conservative in that it didn't include a counterfactual speed up assumption. So, we assumed that the interventions THL carried out each affected 6 to 15x as many hens than reported on average through speeding up the timelines to hens becoming cage-free. Then, since the marginal cost-effectiveness in 2026 is probably much less than the average cost-effectiveness from 2015-2024, we discounted the resulting THL self-reported estimate by 70%. This is a rough guess.
3. In a Guesstimate model, I combined the two estimates (giving equal weight to each) to get an overall estimate of THL's cost-effectiveness on the margin (caveat below). (The ACE estimate was encoded as a lognormal distribution between 2 and 44 hens/$, which had a mean of 14 which is slightly better than their best-guess, which could be a median or mean, I'm not sure). This produced an estimate of 10 (3.6 to 29) hens/$. The method isn't perfect, since these estimates might not be independent so the variance could be artificially reduced, but for our initial version, we felt it was a good enough estimate (other factors matter more to the CCF). 

Upon looking back, I realize that I made a typo in the methodology -- it should be 3.6 to 29 chickens per dollar spent, not 3.6 to 22. So thanks for pointing my attention to this! I've now fixed it.

On the more important question, I agree that the marginal cost-effectiveness is definitely the important question, and I'd like to have this. However, the best estimates we could find for the first version of the CCF were for average cost-effectiveness of past spending. We plan to improve upon these estimates in the future, such as through considering more evidence. If you know of any good marginal cost-effectiveness estimates, or other cost-effectiveness estimates, please do link them below!

Hope this is helpful! Also, I'll look into how to change the settings so you can copy text, I'm not sure why it's like that

I got "0 conflicts, 1 bullet bitten", with the bullet being the repugnant conclusion. 

Does this mean that you have 6 bullets you'd prefer over having to bite the repugnant conclusion? :) 

Some hope for you if you're an EA with a chronic illness.

I’ve been reading the biographies of moral heroes, and I’d guess ~50% of them struggled with ongoing health issues.

Being sick sucks, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to do a ton of good

• Florence Nightingale
• Benjamin Franklin
• William Wilberforce
• Alexander Hamilton
• Helen Keller

It’s not everybody, but it’s a surprising percentage of them.

I myself struggle with a chronic mystery ailment and I find it inspiring to hear about all of these people who still managed to do great things, even though their bodies were not always so cooperative.

(Also, just as an aside, the book Stop Being Your Symptoms, Start Being Yourself didn’t cure my illness, but it did reduce its effects on my life by about 85%, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically CBT/psychology stuff applied to chronic illness)