In Bruce Friedrich's new book, he writes, "Sometimes when I talk about cultivated meat someone will bring up the handful of states that have banned it. I'm mostly unconcerned. Cultivated meat companies won't be able to supply all 50 US states anytime soon anyway. Once there are multiple companies selling their products in...the majority of cities all across the country, the states that banned will-- I predict-- quietly repeal their laws" (p. 191).
It's hard to know how literally to interpret this apparently sanguine attitude, as the book is designed to generate enthusiasm for alternative proteins. But, still it seems raise an important question about the cost-effectiveness of repealing existing bans or preventing further ones. Initial thoughts:
In EA, people use the word "counterfactual" in a non-standard way, but I've never heard this discussed or pointed out. E.g. Jeff writes,
Say I offer to make a counterfactual donation of $50 to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) if you do a thing; which of the following are ok for me to do if you don't?
But outside of the community, "counterfactual" means "didn't happen". I think the word "causal" is closest in meaning to how we use "counterfactual," though it doesn't work in this case.
(In this case, I think the standard English way of communicating the idea is "Say I offer to make a donation of $50 to AMF only if you do a thing...")
Is there a way for me to filter posts below say 15 karma from my frontage? I couldn’t easily find it on mobile.
Applications are now open for TARA Round 2 2026!
Apply by July 26th to join our 14-week APAC-based technical AI safety program (using the ARENA curriculum), designed to accelerate your path to meaningful technical alignment research.
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Our results so far:
→ 90% likelihood-to-recommend
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Strong upvote - too many people see CEA as an authority source on everything EA, rather than a bunch of staff the EA community pays for to do the safe, repeatable stuff.
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!
It seems like, in context to EA, if you're interested in helping people at a global scale (and not focused on global catastrophic risks), you're probably focused on global health.
I am wondering: Is there a clear reason EAs focus on global health over other cause areas such as education, women's rights, economic growth, democracy, corruption, international relations, and other broad improvements to society?
Like, has there been any kind of rigorous research that suggests we should...
Happier lives Institute: https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/
EA also does democracy charity evaluation which you might want to look into https://www.powerfordemocracies.org/
Submission to the Cluelessness Critiques Competition. Code, parameters, and figures: https://github.com/dan-pandori/cluelessness-learning-trap. See the authorship note at the end.
Anthony DiGiovanni's unawareness sequence argues that our understanding of long-run consequences is too coarse to compare options. Severe incomparability follows, and impartial altruism stops being action-guiding...
Hey Dan, just to clarify for you and other readers, this post wouldn't be eligible for the competition, because a) we aren't accepting pieces that have already been published and b) every entry must be submitted via the entry form.
Sorry if this wasn't clear in the announcement post! I'll edit it next week to make this plainer.
Yeah that's a totally fair take. I generally agree that reading AI writing triggers an 'oh brother' feeling for me these days.
I asked the Fable to be more terse & uploaded the edited essay. I personally find this triggers less of my 'oh brother' feelings, but it might still be annoying to you.
I think making predictions (and learning how they go) for the short & medium term future will help us be much more calibrated on our predictions for the long-term future. So all the work on prediction markets etc probably give us better insight there.
I'm not sold on some sort of Great Reflection style pause, but it also doesn't seem like a crazy idea.
I frankly have not thought hard about how acausal influence changes how we should act. I don't have good recommendations. Being kind & having a wide circle of empathy feels pretty robustly good, but I won't pretend to have justified that from the lens of acausal negotiations.
TLDR:
The field of AI safety is bottlenecked on talent. Running recruitment processes is expensive and time-consuming. Freelancers are overlooked. Hiring freelancers can provide a way to quickly and cheaply test a person's fit within an org, and vice versa. Plus, real work gets completed, and freelancers get both compensation and a portfolio piece.
Last week, I wrote about...
Also - to add, if you're UK based, not sure if Impact Ops would consider taking on freelancers to support their consulting offerings to clients, but that could be another avenue.
Of course! Although this is a list of organizations who are INVOLVED in that sector, not necessarily doing the contract work. There's a bit of a spectrum.
Independent Nonprofit Consultants (https://thomasappleyard.com/nonprofit-consultants) and is based in Canada.
IMMA Collective helps its independent-consultant members collaborate on opportunities (https://www.immacollective.com/).
SOCIAL PURPOSE CONSULTANTS - there are a variety of companies like this, but I'm fairly sure you're not asking about that now. However, I suspect that many are collections/networks of consultants.
SUPPORT - These may be useful to contact for more info on the landscape and if looking to expand your network of target audience.
Probably Good https://probablygood.org/ is more general career like 80K Hours vs specific to contracts.
High Impact Professionals (https://highimpactprofessionals.org) is similar in that it's not specific to contractors, but more impact careers generally.
Consultants for Good (https://www.consultants4good.com/) is more about creating a community.
Consultants for Impact (http://consultantsforimpact.org) is a network with career advising, support etc.
I think I may be missing some. Anyway, I hope this is helpful and what you were looking for.
This is an update on my previous posts in which I detailed my plan on how I am going to donate the vast majority of my money to charity when I grow up. I want advice on whether my plan for the future is good, or what I should do differently. I am currently 15, so I have been trying to make decisions that will a) help me maximize my future income by getting into a good college and learning skills so I can donate more to charity and b) help me maximize my lifespan so I can live as long as possi...
I'm less keen on the idea of a campervan, but I know a lot of successful EAs who live with other adult EAs to save money and they find it perfectly comfortable.
Thank you, I found this helpful, especially the parts on staying healthy while trying to go vegan-ish and about what charities to donate to. Also I was wondering why everyone thinks it is so bad to live in a camper van, maybe it is but I don't 100% understand why. I think I would get how it could be said that living with roommates in a relatively cheap apartment would be better versus living alone in a camper van because of the social benefits and not much higher of a cost, but if I lived in a camper van with a roommate versus in an apartment with a roommate I can't really see a huge difference. Also living alone in a van versus an apartment would not be worse on any grounds I could really see, also I think I specifically might be good at the van life because I have been a boy scout for a while and gone on a lot of camping trips, I honestly would be a good person to live in a tent but I wouldn't do that because if I did it in the woods I could get attacked by something and if I was in the city it would be dangerous, but I think a camper van would be safe. Also side note, idrk if it's going to work out the way he imagines it but my younger brother (only about a year younger) wants to live in a camper van when he grows up (for entirely different reasons, he is not an EA, also he might change to decide smth else), so living with him in a camper van (or an apartment) for some time as adults could be a good thing. Just trying to understand why an apartment is considered better that a camper van, ok you didn't really have the most negative reaction to it but others did.
Lydia Laurenson recently posted an article called "The Inside Story of Leverage Research" that gets into substantially more detail on what went on in that organization and I thought made quite an interesting read. However, note also relevant Twitter comments from Oliver Habryka:
Having been around the ecosystem, having inte...
It somehow completely fails to cover Leverage deploying spies into other organizations and trying to take over CEA
I’ve heard this claim from Habryka and others many times and nobody seems to be willing to go on the record to back it up. He does not really think to ask that perhaps Lydia also heard about these rumours and was unable to substantiate them with the rigour required of a published magazine article either.
At least to just satisfy my curiosity, can someone involved privately DM me and explain what this means and provide some evidence for it?
(I otherwise fully agree with Habryka’s assessment that this article feels waaaaay too credible about Leverage and seems to be mostly doing image rehabilitation, from someone who is simply too personally close to the story to be believable as a third-party observer)
Every living thing has to solve the same problem: harvest enough energy to rebuild itself, and keep doing it. Fail once and it dies. That sounds too obvious to be worth saying, but I've come to think something surprising falls out of taking it completely seriously.
Strip biology down to almost nothing — forget DNA, cells, genes, selection, ecosystems, intelligence, even chemistry — and imagine only a machine that repeatedly harvests energy, spends it rebuilding itself, and repeats. The...
I know nothing about the technical challenges of cultivating meat, but regardless I suspect it is much more feasible than moral persuasion.
Assuming we end factory farming before 2100, which factor will have contributed the most?
I put more weight on social moral changes (or "culture") because we already have (at least on the market in Finland) many cheap, tasty, nutritional and good texture plantbased proteins. E.g. in the university canteens, the plant-based option can often have the equivalent nutritional content (regulated by the state so that the canteens get meal subsidies), and there's nothing wrong with the taste, but most of my classmates still choose the animal-based option out of familiarity or habit. A good example of this is my friend who, on the first day in uni, accidentally took the vegan choice, which is usually first in the line. She shared with everyone that this is such well-cooked chicken and didn't believe me when I said it's soy, not chicken. She seemed very puzzled, maybe a bit regretful, I assume because it didn't match her identity to eat plant-based.
Vegan nuggets manage well in blind taste tests, have almost reached price parity, and most people claim they want to eat more plant-based for climate and health reasons; yet we haven't seen a significant shift towards them (said a plant-based lobbyist I talked with).
This is mostly anecdotal, though, and I guess I could make similar arguments the other direction too but for now I lean towards cultural/moral change being more important. BUT, it doesn't mean it's necessarily the most effective thing to work on on the margin.
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
Strong upvote - too many people see CEA as an authority source on everything EA, rather than a bunch of staff the EA community pays for to do the safe, repeatable stuff.
Someone really needs to create a course based on Will's EA in the Age of AGI: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/R8AAG4QBZi5puvogR/effective-altruism-in-the-age-of-agi
Not sure I know the biggest gap overall (and I think here you mostly should prioritize based on where you have a starting approach/personal fit) but I've seen a few uni groups really annoyed at how slow and non-transparent the current grant process feels.
My sense is that grants to uni groups work at tr pace that most grants in the EA space do, but when you're a small uni group and not used to planning ahead, it feels great if you can reach for support (and guidance on using/not getting the money) faster.
my best 11,600-word guess - Bioweapon.AI is finally finished!!
Some notes from me:
It looks like we had a pretty massive bot attack last night, with over 600 accounts logging in and messaging users about an iPad scam. Please don't click on any of their links. The scam looks like this:
We'll remove the accounts, and karma-gate messaging to 10 karma so that this cannot happen again. Sorry everyone - and thanks so much to everyone who reported this. I can't respond to all of you, but thank you.