I now think principles-first EA is more important than I previously thought because it helps prevent effectiveness drift. My anecdotal evidence from AI Safety and especially biosecurity gives me the impression that without constant anchoring to EA and especially comparisons to the clear ToCs and tractability for e.g. AMF, it is easy to lose focus on the high demands of choosing x-risk as a cause area over others. I previously placed less value on having strong links between EA and the various cause areas but now think I should update to thinking strong, continuous engagement with EA is important to keep one's focus on each intervention's cause prioritization assumptions that make it comparable to e.g. AMF or cage free chicken campaigns. This is not to say that causes such as AI Safety and biosec are not important, but that unless constantly tied back to EA cause prioritization, there is risk of drifting away from what made the cause look good in the first place. An example from biosecurity is the very easy slippage away from human extinction scenarios to ones where nearly everone dies (the difference being a crux as it is the potentially enormous future one is saving, not the people living at the time of the catastrophe). That said, it is completely fine and commendable that there is AI Safety and biosecurity work that does not target existential threats, but for EAs such changes in the nature of the work means they should consider changing their career. I think this is also important for newcomers to EA: For those of us who were around when we discussed whether x-risks demanded attention we might take concepts such as Pascal's Mugging as obvious, but for newcomers it is important to engage with such concepts. Another observation I have made is that in animal welfare and global health one is constantly reminded by metrics of suffering alleviated per dollar, but such recurring reminders are lacking in x-risk focused cause areas.

More EA undergrads should do political volunteering. It's impactful AND fun. Choose an election that's impactful (e.g. AI safety candidate) and neglected (e.g. primaries in always-blue/red places), couch-crash the weekend there, and volunteer with the campaign. I say this after doing 15 hours of street canvassing myself. I was surprised by how anecdotally impactful and fun it was. If you like people-watching, talking to strangers, and/or joining passionate projects for a weekend, I think you'll also love this. I wish I thought of this earlier. Literature on the impact (Claude-generated): Kalla & Broockman's meta-analysis of 49 field experiments finds zero average persuasive effect in general elections, but effects do show up when voters lack a partisan cue (i.e. primaries and ballot measures). Mann & Haenschen (2024) find mobilization effects (e.g. canvassing) are 33-76% larger in low-attention races than in high-attention ones. Your marginal volunteer hour goes much further in a primary.

Here's an idea on how funders in AI safety and governance could help applicants improve their applications and projects: Share statistics! (What follows is a text I'm also sending directly to a funder.) I understand you aren't really able to give individualized feedback. Though, as applicants, it would be really helpful to have some more clarity. I think you'd like to give more feedback, if you were able. In thinking about this, here's an idea I had. You could create a score chart, where for every application you keep numerical or binary scores on the reasons it did well or not in the evaluation. Then you can release some statistics publicly. You could for example be able to say things like: * "30% of applications were filtered out because they were not pursuing our AI safety objectives" * "20% we would fund if we had more money" * "40% we'd investigate more deeply if we had more money" * "x% were too hard to understand" * "x% had some flaw in the theory of change" * "x% ..." (I picked more negative than positive slices in these examples, but the positive side is just as interesting.) In fact, some of these statistics would be helpful for donors to <funder>. The scores should track some pretty different kinds of dimensions. Would this be hard to do? I think there can be some pretty different levels of ambition here and some are pretty easy. Releasing just a few pieces of statistics for example might be possible to do based on your current tracking. Potentially, you could even let people request access to some subset of these scores for their application specifically. Something like, the email used to send the application can send an email to request an automated response with the scores you'd be prepared to divulge. Could this create more opportunities for gaming? Well yes, but assuming your criteria are actually good proxies for value, then you also achieve: (1) Better applications (so you get to grant valuable things you might filter otherwise), and

It is common in EA circles to compare deaths counts from some systemic problem to deaths from war. The implication is often that "actually war isn't that bad if you just look at the numbers". The latest being Bentham's Bulldog in an otherwise good article on Nestlé's harmful practices with baby formula (he doesn't say anything about war not being that bad though). I wish that this would stop because deaths aren't the only thing that matters. Below follow a number of claims that are based on my personal impression, not actual sources.  Injury and disability. Generally much more common than death, and the ratio of injury:deaths varies a lot per problem. (Admittedly, baby formula in poor countries seems to have a high disability burden) Trauma and grief. All deaths are grieved. But violent deaths tend to create a lot of trauma in the people around them, including from fleeing/displacement and separation of families and social ties. Economic harm. This is the big one. It sounds cold, but I think the emotional response people have to war footage is actually quite appropriate because of the economic harm. War creates enormous economic harm through the destruction of infrastructure, the displacement of people, and the prevention of (foreign) investment and productive activity. People lose their jobs, become refugees, don't build productive skills, stop education, businesses don't get started, etc etc.  Cultural effects & institutions. I suspect that war reduces the likelihood of tolerant, liberal democratic cultural norms and institutions developing. Instead, I'd expect vengeful, and extractive systems to become more likely. Overall, I don't think deaths are a good proxy for the total harm of war when compared to other causes.

Here’s my understanding of the “standard story” of the timing of different AI-enabled technologies in relation to each other. I wrote out the standard story mostly for my own understanding, but I’m keen for others’ feedback as well. 1. Right now 2. ~Fully automated coder (anything that ~only involves literally writing code) 3. ~Fully automated programmer (including things like architecture, design docs, etc) 4. ~Fully automated small number of other jobs (~whichever things are on the way between programmer and AI R&D that is cheap to automate, or necessary intermediate steps) 5. Fully, or almost fully automated AI R&D (all parts of AI research, including coordination and subjective matters of research taste) – this closes the loop and fully kicks off a software-only intelligence explosion 6. Software-only intelligence explosion (not certain but reasonably likely, that increasing returns to intelligence from better software feeds back in itself) 7. Superhuman AI scientist/all R&D (at this point, AI is better at all natural and social science than any human alive) 8. Cornucopia of new technologies (easy mass surveillance, cures to cancer, novel pandemic technologies like mirror bio, other superweapons, perfect missile defense, maybe though probably not nanotech, maybe though probably not aging)[1] 9. Remote-only superintelligence (Or “superintelligent at almost all cognitive tasks.” at this point, ~anything a human could do in front of a computer that doesn’t require the idiosyncratic taste of having a human work for you[2], an AI can do better and cheaper) 10. Advanced robotics and industrial explosion 11. Full superintelligence (can do anything a human can do more cheaply than 2025 humans) 12. Dyson swarm 13. Probes start being sent to the far reaches of space at appreciable fractions of c.   To the standard story[3], I don’t have much to add personally. It’s a plausible enough story and I don’t think I have particularly contrarian opinions.