Dwarkesh Patel has one of the best podcasts around.

Here’s a lightly-edited extract from his recent conversation with Byrne Hobart.

I’ll share some reflections in the comments.

See also: Twitter version of this post.

Many belief systems have a way of segregating and limiting the impact of the most hardcore believers

Sam Bankman-Fried was an effective altruist and he was a strong proponent of risk-neutrality. We were talking many months ago and you made this really interesting comment that in many belief systems they have a way of segregating and limiting the impact of the most hardcore believers. So if you're a Christian, then the people who take it the most seriously... you can just make them monks so they don't cause that much damage to the rest of the world. Edefective...

Epistemic status: This post is meant to be a conversation starter rather than a conclusive argument. I don’t assert that any of the concerns in it are overwhelming, only that we have too quickly adopted a set of media communication practices without discussing their trade-offs.

Also, while this was in draft form, Shakeel Hashim, CEA’s new head of communications, made some positive comments on the main thesis suggesting that he agreed with a lot of my criticisms and planned to have a much more active involvement with the media. If so, this post may be largely redundant - nonetheless, it seems worth having the conversation in public.

CEA adheres to what they call the fidelity model of spreading ideas, which they formally introduced in 2017, though my sense is it...

This bit of pondering was beyond the scope of the manuscript I was writing (a followup to this post, which is why the examples are all about anti-rodenticide interventions), but I still wanted to share it. Cut from rough draft, lightly edited it so it would make sense to Forum readers and to make the tone more conversational.

It is often difficult to directly engage in political campaigns without incentives to lie or misrepresent. This is exacerbated by the differences in expected communication styles in politics vs the general public vs EA. There is a tradition of strong arguments in broader EA (+rationality) culture for EAs to entirely steer away from politics for both epistemic and effectiveness reasons. I find these arguments persuasive but wonder whether they have become an...

Before I get to the heart of what I want to share, a couple of disclaimers:

• I am one person and, as such, I recognize that my perspective is both informed and limited by my experience and identity. I would like to share my perspective in the hope that it may interact with and broaden yours. 
• In writing this post, my aim is not to be combative nor divisive. The values of Effective Altruism are my values (for the most part - I likely value rationality less than many), and its goals are my goals. I do not, therefore, aim to “take down” or harm the Effective Altruism community. Rather, I hope to challenge us all to think about what it means to be in community.

Who am I and

Low back pain (lumbago) is a leading cause of disability and reduced productivity around the world, and the EA community seems no exception. Since I have had quite a bit of back pain, and spent hundreds of hours searching for solutions, I thought I might as well share some of the many useful tips and resources I've found.

Thanks to the hacks I list below, I've gone from having intense, crippling low back pain to maximizing my wellbeing in an Epicurean sense. (Needless to say, what follows is not medical advice, and may not work for everyone; low back pain can have many causes, and you should probably consult a doctor if you have severe back pain.)

Exercise

Key stretches 🧘🏾‍♀️

Stretch your psoas. A tight psoas muscle can lead to...

• Direct link (to New Yorker website).
• Alternative link (publicly accessible).

This piece from Gideon Lewis-Kraus (the writer for the MacAskill piece) is a recent overview of how EA has reacted to SBF and the FTX collapse. 

Lewis-Kraus's articles are probably the most in-depth public writing on EA, and he has had wide access to EA members and leadership. 

The New Yorker is highly respected and the narratives and attitudes in this piece will influence future perceptions of EA.

This piece contains inside information about discussions or warnings about SBF. It uses interviews from a "senior EA", and excepts from an internal Slack channel used by senior EAs.

When my profile of MacAskill, which discussed internal movement discord about Bankman-Fried’s rise to prominence, appeared in August, Wiblin vented his displeasure on the Slack channel.

Hi everyone, SFF has received numerous emails recently from organizations interested in expedited funding.  I believe a number of people here already know about SFF Speculation Grants, but since we've never actually announced our existence on the EA Forum before:

The Survival and Flourishing Fund has a means of expediting funding requests at any time of year, via applications to our Speculation Grants program:

https://survivalandflourishing.fund/speculation-grants

SFF Speculation Grants are expedited grants organized by SFF outside of our biannual grant-recommendation process (the S-process). “Speculation Grantors” are volunteers with budgets to make these grants. Each Speculation Grantor’s budget grows or increases with the settlement of budget adjustments that we call “impact futures” (explained further below). Currently, we have a total of ~20 Speculation Grantors, with a combined budget of approximately $4MM. Our process and software infrastructure for funding these grants were co-designed by Andrew Critch and Oliver Habryka.

For instructions on how to apply, please visit the link above.

For general information about the Survival and Flourishing Fund, see:

https://survivalandflourishing.fund/

I was convinced that I should work on extinction risk (X-Risk for short) relatively quickly, mostly because three points seemed very intuitive to me when I first heard them: 

1. I should make my decisions based on their expected value.
2. I should not discount the value of future lives in my expected value calculations.
3. Because there will (probably) be more than 10^45 future lives (so many!) extinction risk only needs really, really, really tiny tractability in order to have very high expected value (the highest, perhaps). 

While I was at a retreat the other day for people new to thinking ‘bout extinction, I was talking to someone I thought might be a good fit for working on X-Risk but who was skeptical because, while they agreed with point #1 above, they disagreed philosophically...

TL;DR: Friday, December 16 (and the weekend right after it) will be “Draft Amnesty Days” (DAD) on the Forum. People are encouraged to share unfinished posts, unpolished writing, butterfly ideas, thoughts they’re not sure they endorse, etc. on those days. 

I'm sharing this post primarily to let people know that this is happening (and when — save the dates!). 

We hope that Draft Amnesty Day will let people share valuable drafts that are otherwise sitting around waiting to be finished (something that might never happen). It’s possible that these drafts will later be “upgraded” to full posts; authors will be encouraged to post an updated version if they make significant changes. You can find more on the motivation behind this in the original post about it.

How this will work

During DAD, there will...