FEM’s co-founders look back on their proof of concept campaign and ahead to a pilot campaign

Family Empowerment Media (FEM) is an evidence-driven nonprofit working to improve maternal and child health. We do this by providing clear, compelling, and accurate radio-based communication that targets barriers to the uptake of family planning services. We launched in September 2020, after our co-founders participated in the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. 

We explained in an earlier post (Introducing Family Empowerment Media) post why we think family planning is a cause worth prioritizing. Enabling couples to access modern contraceptives may be one of the most cost-effective ways to avert maternal deaths, in addition to providing a host of other benefits. Often, beliefs and attitudes are the largest obstacle to couples’ accessing modern contraceptives. FEM...

I'm trying to get to the crux of the differences between the progress studies (PS) and the EA / existential risk (XR) communities. I'd love input from you all on my questions below.

The road trip metaphor

Let me set up a metaphor to frame the issue:

Picture all of humanity in a car, traveling down the highway of progress. Both PS and EA/XR agree that the trip is good, and that as long as we don't crash, faster would be better. But:

• XR thinks that the car is out of control and that we need a better grip on the steering wheel. We should not accelerate until we can steer better, and maybe we should even slow down in order to avoid crashing.
• PS thinks we're already slowing down, and so

Meta:

• I'm re-posting this from my Shortform (with minor edits) because someone indicated it might be useful to apply tags to this post.
• This was originally written as quick summary of my current (potentially flawed) understanding in an email conversation.
• I'm not that familiar with the human progress/progress studies communities and would be grateful if people pointed out where my impression of them seems off, as well as for takes on whether I seem correct about what the key points of agreement and disagreement are.
• I think some important omissions from my summary might include:
  • Potential differences in underlying ethical views
  • More detail on why at least some 'progress studies' proponents have significantly lower estimates for existential risk this century, and potential empirical differences regarding how to best mitigate existential risk.
• Another caveat is

This is a linkpost for a two-part update on the Founders Pledge Climate Fund (Part 1: Maximize impact, Part 2: Future plans) that I’ve recently published with my fellow fund manager Anu Khan. Note that this is written for the Founders Pledge blog audience so the style is quite different from the EA Forum. 

The blogs give some detailed insights into what we have been up to over the past seven months and what we are looking at going forward.  We also announce a match fund over USD 1 million which is live until mid-July (or until it is filled, if earlier).

For EAs, I believe there are three key take-aways:

1. We believe that the Founders Pledge Climate Fund outperforms giving to the best individual climate charity, what most EAs

I sent a two-question survey to ~117 people working on long-term AI risk, asking about the level of existential risk from "humanity not doing enough technical AI safety research" and from "AI systems not doing/optimizing what the people deploying them wanted/intended".

44 people responded (~38% response rate). In all cases, these represent the views of specific individuals, not an official view of any organization. Since some people's views may have made them more/less likely to respond, I suggest caution in drawing strong conclusions from the results below. Another reason for caution is that respondents added a lot of caveats to their responses (see the anonymized spreadsheet),${}^1$ which the aggregate numbers don't capture.

I don’t plan to do any analysis on this data, just share it; anyone who wants to analyze...

Cross-posted from the Effective ESG blog.

Thoughtful trade-offs: models for going beyond profit maximisation

There is lots of talk about whether incorporating ESG factors could help improve profitability or returns. 

This post is not about whether or not this is true.

Instead, I claim that this is missing the point.

• I’m sure there will be times when ESG thinking can lead to improved returns/profitability.
• And there will be times when ESG factors are profitability-neutral.
• And I expect there are also times when there’s a tension or trade-off between ESG factors and profitability.

For examples of trade-offs, I’m sure we could come up with strategies for e.g. a fossil fuel company, a tobacco company or an arms manufacturer which will be better from an ESG perspective but suboptimal from a profitability perspective.

It’s all about the trade-offs.

To...

Takeaway

I think using weighted pros / cons (or more generally, arguments for / against) would be a useful norm to promote. For a summary of the reasons why, see the Example section.

Motivation

Though maybe not an explicit norm, many people in EA endorse the idea of putting probabilities to statements in order to clarify one's credence in them. Doing so allows people to be much more precise and avoid the ambiguity of phrases like "almost certain" or "significant chance." It's also helpful for discussion as it can make it clearer how and to what degree people agree or disagree. It seems that many EA community members generally value "putting numbers to things." As an extension of this, I think it would be helpful for more people to weight their pros / cons or arguments for /...

I write The Roots of Progress, a blog about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. Some of my top posts:

• Progress studies as a moral imperative
• Industrial literacy
• Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

I am also the creator of Progress Studies for Young Scholars, an online learning program for high schoolers; and a part-time adviser and technical consultant to Our World in Data, an Oxford-based non-profit for research and data on global development.

My work is funded by grants from Emergent Ventures, Open Philanthropy, the Long-Term Future Fund, and Jaan Tallinn (via the Survival and Flourishing Fund).

Previously, I spent 18 years as a software engineer, engineering manager, and startup founder.

Ask me anything!

UPDATE: I'm pausing for now but will come back and I will try to get to everyone, thanks for all the questions!

See the post introducing this sequence for context, caveats, credits, and links to prior discussion relevant to this sequence as a whole. This post doesn’t necessarily represent the views of my employers.

Summary

In a previous post, I highlighted some observations that I think collectively demonstrate that the current processes by which new EA-aligned research and researchers are “produced” are at least somewhat insufficient, inefficient, and prone to error. In this post, I’ll briefly discuss 19 interventions that might improve that situation. I discuss them in very roughly descending order of how important, tractable, and neglected I think each intervention is, solely from the perspective of improving the EA-aligned research pipeline.^[1] The interventions are:

1. Creating, scaling, and/or improving^[2] EA-aligned research orgs
2. Creating, scaling, and/or improving EA-aligned research training programs (e.g. certain