Brazil has been dealing with massive criminal wildfires for the last few weeks, and the air quality is record-breakingly bad. Besides other obvious issues (ineffective government response in going after the criminals setting fires, climate change making everything worse), hardly anyone is talking about how to deal with the immediate air quality problem. It's a bit bizarre. People aren't widely adopting PFF2 masks and air purifiers. These remain somewhat niche topics even though pretty much everyone is suffering. To be fair, there are occasional media reports and government alerts about how to deal with the situation, but these feel too little, and one only gets them if actively looking for them. 1. It's affecting tens of millions of people (scale ✓) 2. Barely anyone is really addressing it (neglectedness ✓) 3. We have simple solutions that could help a lot (tractability ✓) It feels like there's potential for some serious impact if one approaches this right. It may be a severe case of availability bias, but all this is making me value air quality more as an EA cause area.

The original website for Students for High Impact Charities (SHIC) at https://shicschools.org is down (You can find it in the Wayback Machine), but the program scripts and slides they used in high schools are still available at their google drive link at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_2KLuBlcCg4QWtrYW43UGcwajQ Could potentially be a valuable EA community building resource

I feel like being exposed early on to longer form GovAI-type reports has made me set the bar high for writing my thoughts out in short form, which really sucks in terms of an output standpoint.

Has anyone talked with/lobbied the Gates Foundation on factory farming? I was concerned to read this in Gates Notes. "On the way back to Addis, we stopped at a poultry farm established by the Oromia government to help young people enter the poultry industry. They work there for two or three years, earn a salary and some start-up money, and then go off to start their own agriculture businesses. It was a noisy place—the farm has 20,000 chickens! But it was exciting to meet some aspiring farmers and businesspeople with big dreams." It seems a disaster that the Gates foundation are funding and promoting the rapid scale up of factory farming in Africa, and reversing this seems potentially tractable to me. Could individuals, Gates insiders or the big animal rights orgs take this up?  

Nonprofit organizations should make their sources of funding really obvious and clear: How much money you got from which grantmakers, and approximately when. Any time I go on some org's website and can't find information about their major funders, it's a big red flag. At a bare minimum you should have a list of funders, and I'm confused why more orgs don't do this.

Ilya's Safe Superintelligence Inc. has raised $1B.

I used to frequently come across a certain acronym in EA, used in a context like "I'm working on ___" or "looking for other people who also use ___". I flagged it mentally as a curiosity to explore later, but ended up forgetting what the acronym was. I'm thinking it might be CFAR, which seems to have meant CFAR workshops? If so, 1) what happened to them, and 2) was it common for people to work through the material themselves, self-paced?

London folks - I'm going to be running the EA Taskmaster game again at the AIM office on the afternoon of Sunday 8th September.  It's a fun, slightly geeky, way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Check out last year's list of tasks for a flavour of what's in store 👀 Sign up here  (Wee bit late in properly advertising so please do spread the word!)

[crossposted from my blog; some reflections on developing different problem-solving tools] When all you have is a hammer, everything sure does start to look like a nail. This is not a good thing. I've spent a lot of my life variously 1) Falling in love with physics and physics fundamentalism (the idea that physics is the "building block" of our reality) 2) Training to "think like a physicist" 3) Getting sidetracked by how "thinking like a physicist" interacts with how real people actually do physics in practice 4) Learning a bunch of different skills to tackle interdisciplinary research questions 5) Using those skills to learn more about how different people approach different problems While doing this, I've come to think that identity formation - especially identity formation as an academic - is about learning how to identify different phenomena in the world as nails (problems with specific characteristics) and how to apply hammers (disciplinary techniques) to those nails. As long as you're just using your hammer on a thing that you're pretty sure is a nail, this works well. Physics-shaped hammers are great for physics-shaped nails; sociology-shaped hammers are great for sociology-shaped nails; history-shaped hammers are great for history-shaped nails. The problem with this system is that experts only have hammers in their toolboxes, and not everything in the world is a nail. The desire to make everything into one kind of nail, where one kind of hammer can be applied to every problem, leads to physics envy, to junk science, to junk policy, to real harm. The desire to make everything into one kind of nail also makes it harder for us to tackle interdisciplinary problems - ones where lots of different kinds of expertise are required. If we can't see and understand every dimension of a problem, we haven't a hope in hell of solving it. The biggest problems in the world today - climate breakdown,  pandemic prevention, public health - are wicked problems, ones that can't be easily reduced into nail-shaped problems for hammer-shaped solutions. They require lots of different problem-solving approaches for lots of differently-shaped problems. The question, then, becomes how we stop trying to make everything into a nail - and that requires rethinking what it means to be able to problem-solve in the first place. As I touched on briefly before, training to "think like an expert" is a set of processes that consist of looking at phenomena, figuring out how to approach those phenomena, and figuring out how to arrange these phenomena into something nail-shaped. Becoming recognised as an expert is about being able to demonstrate to others that you can take a phenomenon, form it into a nail shape, and apply your disciplinary hammer to it. If you are very lucky or work in a unique field, you might be trained to see phenomena as having more than one "shape" and more than one useful toolset, but this is still less common than it should be. What's more, as different disciplines mature, we start finding out new things and working in the fields get ever more complicated. This means that when it once might have been possible to apply the disciplinary hammer to a wider set of problems, the maturation of a field means that the set of problems where you can usefully apply the disciplinary hammer becomes smaller and smaller. We have an ever-larger set of problems and most of our tools are wildly unsuited for solving them. How, then, do we move forward? We certainly can't close the proverbial stable doors after the horse has bolted; the only way to stop fields from maturing is to stop people from working on them entirely. Good luck with that. Instead, what we should do is put people working in wildly different fields in the same social spaces. We should encourage them to talk to each other - not just about work, but about life and love and random trivia - so that we can understand each others' perspectives. We should prioritise interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work, as some funding bodies are already doing. And we should really listen to each other and be explicit in how we try to approach problems. Maybe then we can stop seeing everything as a nail, because we'll have more than just a hammer in our collective toolbox.

I'm proud to announce the 5-minute animated short on mental health I wrote back in 2020 is finally finished! I'd love you to watch it and let me know what you think (like, share…). It's currently "unlisted" as I wait to see how the production studio wants to release it publicly. But in the meantime I'm sharing it with my extended network.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ is a great American nonprofit resource: New Incentives in particular seems poised to spend much more after large ~Givewell cash grants

I think more EAs should consider operations/management/doer careers over research careers, and that operations/management/doer careers should be higher status within the community. I get a general vibe that in EA (and probably the world at large), that being a "deep thinking researcher"-type is way higher status than being an "operations/management/doer"-type. Yet the latter is also very high impact work, often higher impact than research (especially on the margin). I see many EAs erroneously try to go into research and stick to research despite having very clear strengths on the operational side and insist that they shouldn't do operations work unless they clearly fail at research first. I've personally felt this at times where I started my career very oriented towards research, was honestly only average or even below-average at it, and then switched into management, which I think has been much higher impact (and likely counterfactually generated at least a dozen or more researchers).

Three million people are employed by the travel (agent) industry worldwide. I am struggling to see how we don't lose 80%+ of those jobs to AI Agents in 3 years (this is ofc just one example). This is going to be an extremely painful process for a lot of people.