Today’s the day!!! 80,000 Hours (the book) launches in the US. This is possibly one of the biggest opportunities for EA-per-se growth that we’ve seen in a while. I’m feeling excited, but also very nervous! We’ve done our best but I don’t know how it’ll be received. I hope people like it 🙂 Shares of our launch post (especially quote tweets) and reviews on Amazon or Goodreads are really really appreciated. Fingers crossed…!!!

The Frontier in 2025 (data), by Gavin Leech, Lauren Gilbert, and Ulkar Aghayeva, rated 202 of the biggest breakthroughs of last year. Some favorites, mainly public health- and society-related: 1. Diagnostics on a phone with no doctor needed (source) 2. Murder rates worldwide have fallen 25% since 2000 (source) ("On average! Potentially some confounding from improved trauma emergency care converting murders into attempted murders") 3. 5 factors explain most of the genetic variance in common mental illnesses (source) 4. Large effect for 5-MeO-DMT for treatment-resistant depression (source) ("Recall that major depression is maybe 2% of the total global burden of disease") 5. For the first time in recent history, China’s emissions might be falling (source) 6. The first evidence of a solar take-off in Africa (source) 7. A tiny number of people are functionally cured of HIV. The antibodies responsible may have been identified (source) 8. An E. coli vaccine is currently undergoing Phase III human testing (source): "E. coli is the second-most lethal bacterium in the world, with about a million deaths a year. There are currently no effective vaccines for it" 9. Extreme poverty drops from 27% of India to 5% in one decade (source) 10. Observational follow-up on the Covid vaccines shows a large decrease in all-cause mortality (source) 11. First-in-human 'prime editing' gene therapy. Cured an inherited immune disease (source) 12. Last year's biannual HIV shot available in low-income countries, $40/year (source) 13. AI designs antibodies that can turn on or off membrane signaling proteins implicated in many diseases (source) 14. AI for antibiotic design (source): "7 of 24 AI-designed and custom-synthesized compounds show selective antibacterial activity, including against N. gonorrhoeae and S. aureus" 15. AI generator for antibodies against specific protein targets (source) 16. Two promising drugs to prevent secondary and post-surgical stroke (source) 1

Significant fractions of Magnifica Humanitas, the papal encylical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, is written significantly by AI, most likely Claude. I currently believe Pope Leo himself was not personally responsible (encyclicals tend to be group projects), however the AI usage is likely substantial enough that it's not the result of minor brushups or AI translation: https://linch.substack.com/p/claude-author-of-the-humanitas Key claims: 1. Significant fractions of the recent papal encyclical are written by AI. I provide multiple lines of evidence for this. 2. We can corroborate the vibes and tonal indications with statistical evidence. Phrases and punctuation much more commonly used by AI are much more present in this papal encyclical than past encyclicals. 3. The best commercially available AI detector, Pangram, notes that some paragraphs are between 40% and 100% AI, while most paragraphs appear to be 0% AI. 1. This is unlikely to be a false positive: 1. 0% of paragraphs in past encyclicals I backtested are registered as AI. 2. Pangram in general has a very low false positive rate 4. This is overall very unlikely to be a translation artifact (including AI translation). We again have multiple lines of evidence: 1. All the most prominent signs of AI I observed in English are preserved verbatim in the Italian version, as well as in other translations. 2. The Italian version of the current encyclical also gets flagged as AI by Pangram (actually more so than the English version), though I’m not aware of academic research or rigorous testing of Pangram’s service when applied to Italian) 3. Backtesting AI translation of past encyclicals get 0% on Pangram 5. The specific AI used is most likely Claude, judging by both textual and circumstantial evidence. 6. Different sections of the encyclical have very different rates of apparent AI usage. This indicates to me that some cardinals used AI assi

I liked GiveDirectly's recent update via GWWC's email newsletter: All this for slightly over $800 per beneficiary. Hell of a benchmark, cash transfers.

Is anybody here doing something about the most recent ebola outbreak?