Hi all!  A heads up that it is that time again - Magnify mentee applications are open :) More below. Thank you so much :) ___ "Magnify Mentoring applications are now open for women, non-binary, and trans people of all genders who are looking to pursue high impact careers. You can apply here. Applications will close on the 10th July 2024.  Past mentees have been particularly successful when they have a sense of what they would like to achieve through mentorship. The matching process normally takes us between 4-6 weeks. We look to match pairings based on the needs and availability of the mentee and mentor, their goals, career paths, and what skills they are looking to develop.  On average, mentees and mentors meet once a month for 60-90 minutes with a series of optional prompt questions prepared by our team. In the post-round feedback form, the average for “I recommend being a Magnify mentee” was 9.28/10 in Round 3 and 9.4/10 in Round 4. You can see testimonies from some of our mentees  here, here and here.. Some reported outcomes for mentees were: 1. Advice, guidance, and resources on achieving goals.  2. Connection and support in pursuing opportunities (jobs, funding).  3. Confidence-building. 4. Specific guidance (How to network? How to write a good resume?). 5. Joining a welcoming community for support through challenges"

If anyone who disagrees with me on the manifest stuff who considers themselves inside the EA movement, I'd like to have some discussions with a focus on consensus-building. ie we chat in DMs and the both report some statements we agreed on and some we specifically disagreed on.   Edited: @Joseph Lemien asked for positions I hold: * The EA forum should not seek to have opinions on non-EA events. I don't mean individual EAs shouldn't have opinions, I mean that as a group we shouldn't seek to judge individual event. I don't think we're very good at it. *  I don't like Hanania's behaviour either and am a little wary of systems where norm breaking behaviour gives extra power, such as being endlessly edgy. But I will take those complaints to the manifold community internally. * EAGs are welcome to invite or disinvite whoever CEA likes. Maybe one day I'll complain. But do I want EAGs to invite a load of manifest's edgiest speakers? Not particularly.  * It is fine for there to be spaces with discussion that I find ugly. If people want to go to these events, that's up to them. * I dislike having unresolved conflicts which ossify into an inability to talk about things. Someone once told me that the couples who stay together are either great at settling disputes or almost never fight. We fight a bit and we aren't great at settling it. I guess I'd like us to fight less (say we aren't interested in conflicty posts) or to get better at making up (come to consensus afterwards, grow and change) * Only 1-6% of attendees at manifest had issues along eugenicsy lines in the feedback forms. I don't think this is worth a huge change.  * I would imagine it's worth $10mns to avoid EA becoming a space full of people who fearmonger based on the races, genders or sexualities of others. I don't think that's very likely. * To me, current systems for taxing discussion of eugenics seem fine. There is the odd post that gets downvoted. If it were good and convincing it would be upvoted. so far it hasn't been. seems fine. I am not scared of bad arguments [1] * Black people are probably not avoiding Manifest because of these speakers because that theory doesn't seem to hold up for tech, rationalism[2], EA or several other communities.  * I don't know what people want when they point at "distancing EA from rationalism" * Manifest was fun for me, and it and several other events I went to in the bay felt like I let out a breath that I never knew I was holding. I am pretty careful what I say about you all sometimes and it's tiring. I guess that's true for some of you too. It was nice (and surprisingly un-edgy for me) to be in a space where I didn't have to worry about offending people a lot. I enjoy having spaces where I feel safer. * There is a tradeoff between feeling safe and expression. I would have more time for some proposals if people acknowledged the costs they are putting on others. Even small costs, even costs I would willingly pay are still costs and to have that be unmentionable feels gaslighty.  * There are some incentives in this community to be upset about things and to be blunt in response. Both of these things seem bad. I'd prefer incentives towards working together to figure out how the world is and impliment the most effective morally agreeable changes per unit resource. This requires some truthseeking, but probably not the maximal amount. and some kindness, but probably not the maximal amount.  1. ^ Unless there was some kind of flooding of the forum to boost posts repeatedly. 2. ^ LessWrong doesn't have any significant discussion of eugenics either. As I (weakly) understand it they kicked many posters off who wanted to talk about such things.

Why are seitan products so expensive? I strongly believe in the price, taste, convenience hypothesis. If/when non-animal foods are cheaper and tastier, I expect the west to undergo a moral cascade where factory farming in a very short timespan will go from being common place to illegal. I know that in the animal welfare space, this view point is often considered naive, but I remain convinced its true. My mother buys the expensive vegan mayonnaise because it's much tastier than the regular mayonnaise. I still eat dairy and eggs because the vegan alternatives suck. What I don't understand is why vegan alternatives have proven so difficult to make cheap and tasty. Are there any good write ups on this? Like when I go to a supermarket in Copenhagen, every seitan product will charge a significant markup over the raw cost of the ingredients (Amazon will sell you kilos of seitan flour at very little cost). Do consumers have sufficiently inelastic preferences that a small market high-markup is the most profitable strategy? Is the final market too small for producers to reach economies of scale for seitan, or is it just difficult to bootstrap? I would love to better understand what the demand curves look like for various categories of vegan products, as I really can't wrap my mind around how the current equilibrium came about

I'm nervous that the EA Forum might be having a small role for x-risk and some high-level prioritization work. - Very little biorisk content here, perhaps because of info-hazards. - Little technical AI safety work here, in part because that's more for LessWrong / Alignment Forum. - Little AI governance work here, for whatever reason. - Not too much innovative, big-picture longtermist prioritization projects happening at the moment, from what I understand.  - The cause of "EA community building" seems to be fairly stable, not much bold/controversial experimentation, from what I can tell. - Fairly few updates / discussion from grantmakers. OP is really the dominant one, and doesn't publish too much, particularly about their grantmaking strategies and findings. It's been feeling pretty quiet here recently, for my interests. I think some important threads are now happening in private slack / in-person conversations or just not happening. 

Post: OAI NDA drama, do we know that Anthropic does not do similar things? I heard something that reassured me but I no longer know what it was. Interested in what people have heard or know (feel free to DM me) or general takes on the sitaution.