The World Happiness Report 2025 is out! I bang this drum a lot, but it does genuinely appear that once a country reaches the upper-middle income bracket, GDP doesn’t seem to matter much more. Also featuring is a chapter from the Happier Lives Institute, where they compare the cost-effectiveness of improving wellbeing across multiple charities. They find that the top charities (including Pure Earth and Tamaika) might be 100x as cost-effective as others, especially those in high-income countries.

Sharing https://earec.net, semantic search for the EA + rationality ecosystem. Not fully up to date, sadly (doesn't have the last month or so of content). The current version is basically a minimal viable product!  On the results page there is also an option to see EA Forum only results which allow you to sort by a weighted combination of karma and semantic similarity thanks to the API! Final feature to note is that there's an option to have gpt-4o-mini "manually" read through the summary of each article on the current screen of results, which will give better evaluations of relevance to some query (e.g. "sources I can use for a project on X") than semantic similarity alone.   Still kinda janky - as I said, minimal viable product right now. Enjoy and feedback is welcome! Thanks to @Nathan Young for commissioning this! 

It seems like "what can we actually do to make the future better (if we have a future)?" is a question that keeps on coming up for people in the debate week. I've thought about some things related to this, and thought it might be worth pulling some of those threads together (with apologies for leaving it kind of abstract). Roughly speaking, I think that: * Optimal futures flow from having a good reflective process steering things * It's sort of a race to have a good process steering before a bad process * Averting AI takeover and averting human takeover are both ways to avoid the bad process thing (although of course it's possible to have a takeover still lead to a good process) * We're going to need higher powered epistemic+coordination tech to build the good process * But note that these tools are also very useful for avoiding falling into extinction or other bad trajectories, so this activity doesn't cleanly fall out on either side of the "make the future better" vs "make there be a future" debate   There are some other activities which might help make the future better without doing so much to increase the chance of having a future, e.g.: * Try to propagate "good" values (I first wrote "enlightenment" instead of "good", since I think the truth-seeking element is especially important for ending up somewhere good; but others may differ), to make it more likely that they're well-represented in whatever entities end up steering * Work to anticipate and reduce the risk of worst-case futures (e.g. by cutting off the types of process that might lead there) However, these activities don't (to me) seem as high leverage for improving the future as the more mixed-purpose activities.

Counting people is hard. Here are some readings I've come across recently on this, collected in one place for my own edification:  1. Oliver Kim's How Much Should We Trust Developing Country GDP? is full of sobering quotes. Here's one: "Hollowed out by years of state neglect, African statistical agencies are now often unable to conduct basic survey and sampling work... [e.g.] population figures [are] extrapolated from censuses that are decades-old". The GDP anecdotes are even more heartbreaking 2. Have we vastly underestimated the total number of people on Earth? Quote: "Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues at Aalto University, Finland, were working to understand the extent to which dam construction projects caused people to be resettled, but while estimating populations, they kept getting vastly different numbers to official statistics. To investigate, they used data on 307 dam projects in 35 countries, including China, Brazil, Australia and Poland, all completed between 1980 and 2010, taking the number of people reported as resettled in each case as the population in that area prior to displacement. They then cross-checked these numbers against five major population datasets that break down areas into a grid of squares and estimate the number of people living in each square to arrive at totals... According to their analysis, the most accurate estimates undercounted the real number of people by 53 per cent on average, while the worst was 84 per cent out." 3. David Nash's Nigeria's Missing 50 Million People argues that (quote) "Nigeria's official population (~220-230 million) may be significantly inflated and could be closer to 170-180 million (another article claims 120 million) likely driven by political and financial incentives for states". The comments are insightful too, e.g. David's comment that Uganda and Burkina Faso have the opposite problem ("in Burkina Faso the issue was that GDP per capita numbers were calculated from industrial output divided by po

Over the years I've written some posts that are relevant to this week's debate topic. I collected and summarized some of them below: "Disappointing Futures" Might Be As Important As Existential Risks The best possible future is much better than a "normal" future. Even if we avert extinction, we might still miss out on >99% of the potential of the future. Is Preventing Human Extinction Good? A list of reasons why a human-controlled future might be net positive or negative. Overall I expect it to be net positive. On Values Spreading Hard to summarize but this post basically talks about spreading good values as a way of positively influencing the far future, some reasons why it might be a top intervention, and some problems with it.