I think some of the AI safety policy community has over-indexed on the visual model of the "Overton Window" and under-indexed on alternatives like the "ratchet effect," "poisoning the well," "clown attacks," and other models where proposing radical changes can make you, your allies, and your ideas look unreasonable. I'm not familiar with a lot of systematic empirical evidence on either side, but it seems to me like the more effective actors in the DC establishment overall are much more in the habit of looking for small wins that are both good in themselves and shrink the size of the ask for their ideal policy than of pushing for their ideal vision and then making concessions. Possibly an ideal ecosystem has both strategies, but it seems possible that at least some versions of "Overton Window-moving" strategies executed in practice have larger negative effects via associating their "side" with unreasonable-sounding ideas in the minds of very bandwidth-constrained policymakers, who strongly lean on signals of credibility and consensus when quickly evaluating policy options, than the positive effects of increasing the odds of ideal policy and improving the framing for non-ideal but pretty good policies. In theory, the Overton Window model is just a description of what ideas are taken seriously, so it can indeed accommodate backfire effects where you argue for an idea "outside the window" and this actually makes the window narrower. But I think the visual imagery of "windows" actually struggles to accommodate this -- when was the last time you tried to open a window and accidentally closed it instead? -- and as a result, people who rely on this model are more likely to underrate these kinds of consequences. Would be interested in empirical evidence on this question (ideally actual studies from psych, political science, sociology, econ, etc literatures, rather than specific case studies due to reference class tennis type issues).

Trump recently said in an interview (https://time.com/6972973/biden-trump-bird-flu-covid/) that he would seek to disband the White House office for pandemic preparedness. Given that he usually doesn't give specifics on his policy positions, this seems like something he is particularly interested in. I know politics is discouraged on the EA forum, but I thought I would post this to say: EA should really be preparing for a Trump presidency. He's up in the polls and IMO has a >50% chance of winning the election. Right now politicians seem relatively receptive to EA ideas, this may change under a Trump administration.

Excerpt from the most recent update from the ALERT team:   Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1: What a week! The news, data, and analyses are coming in fast and furious. Overall, ALERT team members feel that the risk of an H5N1 pandemic emerging over the coming decade is increasing. Team members estimate that the chance that the WHO will declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) within 1 year from now because of an H5N1 virus, in whole or in part, is 0.9% (range 0.5%-1.3%). The team sees the chance going up substantially over the next decade, with the 5-year chance at 13% (range 10%-15%) and the 10-year chance increasing to 25% (range 20%-30%).   their estimated 10 year risk is a lot higher than I would have anticipated.

A lot of policy research seems to be written with an agenda in mind to shape the narrative. And this kind of destroys the point of policy research which is supposed to inform stakeholders and not actively convince or really nudge them. This might cause polarization in some topics and is in itself, probably snatching legitimacy away from the space. I have seen similar concerning parallels in the non-profit space, where some third-sector actors endorse/do things which they see as being good but destroys trust in the whole space. This gives me scary unilaterist's curse vibes..

Is EA as a bait and switch a compelling argument for it being bad? I don't really think so 1. There are a wide variety of baits and switches, from what I'd call misleading to some pretty normal activities - is it a bait and switch when churches don't discuss their most controversial beliefs at a "bring your friends" service? What about wearing nice clothes to a first date? [1] 2. EA is a big movement composed of different groups[2]. Many describe it differently. 3. EA has done so much global health stuff I am not sure it can be described as a bait and switch. eg https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ip7nXs7l-8sahT6ehvk2pBrlQ6Umy5IMPYStO3taaoc/edit#gid=9418963 4. EA is way more transparent than any comparable movement. If it is a bait and switch then it does so much more to make clear where the money goes eg (https://openbook.fyi/). On the other hand: 1. I do sometimes see people describing EA too favourably or pushing an inaccurate line.   I think that transparency comes with a feature of allowing anyone to come and say "what's going on there" and that can be very beneficial at avoiding error but also bad criticism can be too cheap.  Overall I don't find this line that compelling. And that parts that are seem largely in the past when EA was smaller (when perhaps it mattered less). Now that EA is big, it's pretty clear that it cares about many different things.  Seems fine.  1. ^ @Richard Y Chappell created the analogy.  2. ^ @Sean_o_h argues that here. 

In this "quick take", I want to summarize some my idiosyncratic views on AI risk.  My goal here is to list just a few ideas that cause me to approach the subject differently from how I perceive most other EAs view the topic. These ideas largely push me in the direction of making me more optimistic about AI, and less likely to support heavy regulations on AI. (Note that I won't spend a lot of time justifying each of these views here. I'm mostly stating these points without lengthy justifications, in case anyone is curious. These ideas can perhaps inform why I spend significant amounts of my time pushing back against AI risk arguments. Not all of these ideas are rare, and some of them may indeed be popular among EAs.) 1. Skepticism of the treacherous turn: The treacherous turn is the idea that (1) at some point there will be a very smart unaligned AI, (2) when weak, this AI will pretend to be nice, but (3) when sufficiently strong, this AI will turn on humanity by taking over the world by surprise, and then (4) optimize the universe without constraint, which would be very bad for humans. By comparison, I find it more likely that no individual AI will ever be strong enough to take over the world, in the sense of overthrowing the world's existing institutions and governments by surprise. Instead, I broadly expect unaligned AIs will integrate into society and try to accomplish their goals by advocating for their legal rights, rather than trying to overthrow our institutions by force. Upon attaining legal personhood, unaligned AIs can utilize their legal rights to achieve their objectives, for example by getting a job and trading their labor for property, within the already-existing institutions. Because the world is not zero sum, and there are economic benefits to scale and specialization, this argument implies that unaligned AIs may well have a net-positive effect on humans, as they could trade with us, producing value in exchange for our own property and services. Note that my claim here is not that AIs will never become smarter than humans. One way of seeing how these two claims are distinguished is to compare my scenario to the case of genetically engineered humans. By assumption, if we genetically engineered humans, they would presumably eventually surpass ordinary humans in intelligence (along with social persuasion ability, and ability to deceive etc.). However, by itself, the fact that genetically engineered humans will become smarter than non-engineered humans does not imply that genetically engineered humans would try to overthrow the government. Instead, as in the case of AIs, I expect genetically engineered humans would largely try to work within existing institutions, rather than violently overthrow them. 2. AI alignment will probably be somewhat easy: The most direct and strongest current empirical evidence we have about the difficulty of AI alignment, in my view, comes from existing frontier LLMs, such as GPT-4. Having spent dozens of hours testing GPT-4's abilities and moral reasoning, I think the system is already substantially more law-abiding, thoughtful and ethical than a large fraction of humans. Most importantly, this ethical reasoning extends (in my experience) to highly unusual thought experiments that almost certainly did not appear in its training data, demonstrating a fair degree of ethical generalization, beyond mere memorization. It is conceivable that GPT-4's apparently ethical nature is fake. Perhaps GPT-4 is lying about its motives to me and in fact desires something completely different than what it professes to care about. Maybe GPT-4 merely "understands" or "predicts" human morality without actually "caring" about human morality. But while these scenarios are logically possible, they seem less plausible to me than the simple alternative explanation that alignment—like many other properties of ML models—generalizes well, in the natural way that you might similarly expect from a human. Of course, the fact that GPT-4 is easily alignable does not immediately imply that smarter-than-human AIs will be easy to align. However, I think this current evidence is still significant, and aligns well with prior theoretical arguments that alignment would be easy. In particular, I am persuaded by the argument that, because evaluation is usually easier than generation, it should be feasible to accurately evaluate whether a slightly-smarter-than-human AI is taking bad actions, allowing us to shape its rewards during training accordingly. After we've aligned a model that's merely slightly smarter than humans, we can use it to help us align even smarter AIs, and so on, plausibly implying that alignment will scale to indefinitely higher levels of intelligence, without necessarily breaking down at any physically realistic point. 3. The default social response to AI will likely be strong: One reason to support heavy regulations on AI right now is if you think the natural "default" social response to AI will lean too heavily on the side of laissez faire than optimal, i.e., by default, we will have too little regulation rather than too much. In this case, you could believe that, by advocating for regulations now, you're making it more likely that we regulate AI a bit more than we otherwise would have, pushing us closer to the optimal level of regulation. I'm quite skeptical of this argument because I think that the default response to AI (in the absence of intervention from the EA community) will already be quite strong. My view here is informed by the base rate of technologies being overregulated, which I think is quite high. In fact, it is difficult for me to name even a single technology that I think is currently clearly underregulated by society. By pushing for more regulation on AI, I think it's likely that we will overshoot and over-constrain AI relative to the optimal level. In other words, my personal bias is towards thinking that society will regulate technologies too heavily, rather than too loosely. And I don't see a strong reason to think that AI will be any different from this general historical pattern. This makes me hesitant to push for more regulation on AI, since on my view, the marginal impact of my advocacy would likely be to push us even further in the direction of "too much regulation", overshooting the optimal level by even more than what I'd expect in the absence of my advocacy. 4. I view unaligned AIs as having comparable moral value to humans: This idea was explored in one of my most recent posts. The basic idea is that, under various physicalist views of consciousness, you should expect AIs to be conscious, even if they do not share human preferences. Moreover, it seems likely that AIs — even ones that don't share human preferences — will be pretrained on human data, and therefore largely share our social and moral concepts. Since unaligned AIs will likely be both conscious and share human social and moral concepts, I don't see much reason to think of them as less "deserving" of life and liberty, from a cosmopolitan moral perspective. They will likely think similarly to the way we do across a variety of relevant axes, even if their neural structures are quite different from our own. As a consequence, I am pretty happy to incorporate unaligned AIs into the legal system and grant them some control of the future, just as I'd be happy to grant some control of the future to human children, even if they don't share my exact values. Put another way, I view (what I perceive as) the EA attempt to privilege "human values" over "AI values" as being largely arbitrary and baseless, from an impartial moral perspective. There are many humans whose values I vehemently disagree with, but I nonetheless respect their autonomy, and do not wish to deny these humans their legal rights. Likewise, even if I strongly disagreed with the values of an advanced AI, I would still see value in their preferences being satisfied for their own sake, and I would try to respect the AI's autonomy and legal rights. I don't have a lot of faith in the inherent kindness of human nature relative to a "default unaligned" AI alternative. 5. I'm not fully committed to longtermism: I think AI has an enormous potential to benefit the lives of people who currently exist. I predict that AIs can eventually substitute for human researchers, and thereby accelerate technological progress, including in medicine. In combination with my other beliefs (such as my belief that AI alignment will probably be somewhat easy), this view leads me to think that AI development will likely be net-positive for people who exist at the time of alignment. In other words, if we allow AI development, it is likely that we can use AI to reduce human mortality, and dramatically raise human well-being for the people who already exist. I think these benefits are large and important, and commensurate with the downside potential of existential risks. While a fully committed strong longtermist might scoff at the idea that curing aging might be important — as it would largely only have short-term effects, rather than long-term effects that reverberate for billions of years — by contrast, I think it's really important to try to improve the lives of people who currently exist. Many people view this perspective as a form of moral partiality that we should discard for being arbitrary. However, I think morality is itself arbitrary: it can be anything we want it to be. And I choose to value currently existing humans, to a substantial (though not overwhelming) degree. This doesn't mean I'm a fully committed near-termist. I sympathize with many of the intuitions behind longtermism. For example, if curing aging required raising the probability of human extinction by 40 percentage points, or something like that, I don't think I'd do it. But in more realistic scenarios that we are likely to actually encounter, I think it's plausibly a lot better to accelerate AI, rather than delay AI, on current margins. This view simply makes sense to me given the enormously positive effects I expect AI will likely have on the people I currently know and love, if we allow development to continue.

First in-ovo sexing in the US Egg Innovations announced that they are "on track to adopt the technology in early 2025." Approximately 300 million male chicks are ground up alive in the US each year (since only female chicks are valuable) and in-ovo sexing would prevent this.  UEP originally promised to eliminate male chick culling by 2020; needless to say, they didn't keep that commitment. But better late than never!  Congrats to everyone working on this, including @Robert - Innovate Animal Ag, who founded an organization devoted to pushing this technology.[1] 1. ^ Egg Innovations says they can't disclose details about who they are working with for NDA reasons; if anyone has more information about who deserves credit for this, please comment!

Consider donating all or most of your Mana on Manifold to charity before May 1. Manifold is making multiple changes to the way Manifold works. You can read their announcement here. The main reason for donating now is that Mana will be devalued from the current 1 USD:100 Mana to 1 USD:1000 Mana on May 1. Thankfully, the 10k USD/month charity cap will not be in place until then. Also this part might be relevant for people with large positions they want to sell now: > One week may not be enough time for users with larger portfolios to liquidate and donate. We want to work individually with anyone who feels like they are stuck in this situation and honor their expected returns and agree on an amount they can donate at the original 100:1 rate past the one week deadline once the relevant markets have resolved.

GiveWell and Open Philanthropy just made a $1.5M grant to Malengo! Congratulations to @Johannes Haushofer and the whole team, this seems such a promising intervention from a wide variety of views

CEA is hiring for someone to lead the EA Global program. CEA's three flagship EAG conferences facilitate tens of thousands of highly impactful connections each year that help people build professional relationships, apply for jobs, and make other critical career decisions. This is a role that comes with a large amount of autonomy, and one that plays a key role in shaping a key piece of the effective altruism community’s landscape.  See more details and apply here!

Animal Justice Appreciation Note Animal Justice et al. v A.G of Ontario 2024 was recently decided and struck down large portions of Ontario's ag-gag law. A blog post is here. The suit was partially funded by ACE, which presumably means that many of the people reading this deserve partial credit for donating to support it. Thanks to Animal Justice (Andrea Gonsalves, Fredrick Schumann, Kaitlyn Mitchell, Scott Tinney), co-applicants Jessica Scott-Reid and Louise Jorgensen, and everyone who supported this work!

Marcus Daniell appreciation note @Marcus Daniell, cofounder of High Impact Athletes, came back from knee surgery and is donating half of his prize money this year. He projects raising $100,000. Through a partnership with Momentum, people can pledge to donate for each point he gets; he has raised $28,000 through this so far. It's cool to see this, and I'm wishing him luck for his final year of professional play!

FHI has shut down yesterday: https://www.futureofhumanityinstitute.org/

An alternate stance on moderation (from @Habryka.) This is from this comment responding to this post about there being too many bans on LessWrong. Note how the LessWrong is less moderated than here in that it (I guess) responds to individual posts less often, but more moderated in that I guess it rate limits people more without reason.  I found it thought provoking. I'd recommend reading it. > Thanks for making this post!  > > One of the reasons why I like rate-limits instead of bans is that it allows people to complain about the rate-limiting and to participate in discussion on their own posts (so seeing a harsh rate-limit of something like "1 comment per 3 days" is not equivalent to a general ban from LessWrong, but should be more interpreted as "please comment primarily on your own posts", though of course it shares many important properties of a ban). This is a pretty opposite approach to the EA forum which favours bans. > Things that seem most important to bring up in terms of moderation philosophy:  > > Moderation on LessWrong does not depend on effort > > "Another thing I've noticed is that almost all the users are trying.  They are trying to use rationality, trying to understand what's been written here, trying to apply Baye's rule or understand AI.  Even some of the users with negative karma are trying, just having more difficulty." > > Just because someone is genuinely trying to contribute to LessWrong, does not mean LessWrong is a good place for them. LessWrong has a particular culture, with particular standards and particular interests, and I think many people, even if they are genuinely trying, don't fit well within that culture and those standards.  > > In making rate-limiting decisions like this I don't pay much attention to whether the user in question is "genuinely trying " to contribute to LW,  I am mostly just evaluating the effects I see their actions having on the quality of the discussions happening on the site, and the quality of the ideas they are contributing.  > > Motivation and goals are of course a relevant component to model, but that mostly pushes in the opposite direction, in that if I have someone who seems to be making great contributions, and I learn they aren't even trying, then that makes me more excited, since there is upside if they do become more motivated in the future. I sense this is quite different to the EA forum too. I can't imagine a mod saying I don't pay much attention to whether the user in question is "genuinely trying". I find this honesty pretty stark. Feels like a thing moderators aren't allowed to say. "We don't like the quality of your comments and we don't think you can improve". > Signal to Noise ratio is important > > Thomas and Elizabeth pointed this out already, but just because someone's comments don't seem actively bad, doesn't mean I don't want to limit their ability to contribute. We do a lot of things on LW to improve the signal to noise ratio of content on the site, and one of those things is to reduce the amount of noise, even if the mean of what we remove looks not actively harmful.  > > We of course also do other things than to remove some of the lower signal content to improve the signal to noise ratio. Voting does a lot, how we sort the frontpage does a lot, subscriptions and notification systems do a lot. But rate-limiting is also a tool I use for the same purpose. > Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not > > I think if you've been around for a while on LessWrong, and I decide to rate-limit you, then I think it makes sense for me to make some time to argue with you about that, and give you the opportunity to convince me that I am wrong. But if you are new, and haven't invested a lot in the site, then I think I owe you relatively little.  > > I think in doing the above rate-limits, we did not do enough to give established users the affordance to push back and argue with us about them. I do think most of these users are relatively recent or are users we've been very straightforward with since shortly after they started commenting that we don't think they are breaking even on their contributions to the site (like the OP Gerald Monroe, with whom we had 3 separate conversations over the past few months), and for those I don't think we owe them much of an explanation. LessWrong is a walled garden.  > > You do not by default have the right to be here, and I don't want to, and cannot, accept the burden of explaining to everyone who wants to be here but who I don't want here, why I am making my decisions. As such a moderation principle that we've been aspiring to for quite a while is to let new users know as early as possible if we think them being on the site is unlikely to work out, so that if you have been around for a while you can feel stable, and also so that you don't invest in something that will end up being taken away from you. > > Feedback helps a bit, especially if you are young, but usually doesn't > > Maybe there are other people who are much better at giving feedback and helping people grow as commenters, but my personal experience is that giving users feedback, especially the second or third time, rarely tends to substantially improve things.  > > I think this sucks. I would much rather be in a world where the usual reasons why I think someone isn't positively contributing to LessWrong were of the type that a short conversation could clear up and fix, but it alas does not appear so, and after having spent many hundreds of hours over the years giving people individualized feedback, I don't really think "give people specific and detailed feedback" is a viable moderation strategy, at least more than once or twice per user. I recognize that this can feel unfair on the receiving end, and I also feel sad about it. > > I do think the one exception here is that if people are young or are non-native english speakers. Do let me know if you are in your teens or you are a non-native english speaker who is still learning the language. People do really get a lot better at communication between the ages of 14-22 and people's english does get substantially better over time, and this helps with all kinds communication issues. Again this is very blunt but I'm not sure it's wrong.  > We consider legibility, but its only a relatively small input into our moderation decisions > > It is valuable and a precious public good to make it easy to know which actions you take will cause you to end up being removed from a space. However, that legibility also comes at great cost, especially in social contexts. Every clear and bright-line rule you outline will have people budding right up against it, and de-facto, in my experience, moderation of social spaces like LessWrong is not the kind of thing you can do while being legible in the way that for example modern courts aim to be legible.  > > As such, we don't have laws. If anything we have something like case-law which gets established as individual moderation disputes arise, which we then use as guidelines for future decisions, but also a huge fraction of our moderation decisions are downstream of complicated models we formed about what kind of conversations and interactions work on LessWrong, and what role we want LessWrong to play in the broader world, and those shift and change as new evidence comes in and the world changes. > > I do ultimately still try pretty hard to give people guidelines and to draw lines that help people feel secure in their relationship to LessWrong, and I care a lot about this, but at the end of the day I will still make many from-the-outside-arbitrary-seeming-decisions in order to keep LessWrong the precious walled garden that it is. > > I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber > > When making moderation decisions, it's always at the top of my mind whether I am tempted to make a decision one way or another because they disagree with me on some object-level issue. I try pretty hard to not have that affect my decisions, and as a result have what feels to me a subjectively substantially higher standard for rate-limiting or banning people who disagree with me, than for people who agree with me. I think this is reflected in the decisions above. > > I do feel comfortable judging people on the methodologies and abstract principles that they seem to use to arrive at their conclusions. LessWrong has a specific epistemology, and I care about protecting that. If you are primarily trying to...  > > * argue from authority,  > * don't like speaking in probabilistic terms,  > * aren't comfortable holding multiple conflicting models in your head at the same time,  > * or are averse to breaking things down into mechanistic and reductionist terms,  > > then LW is probably not for you, and I feel fine with that. I feel comfortable reducing the visibility or volume of content on the site that is in conflict with these epistemological principles (of course this list isn't exhaustive, in-general the LW sequences are the best pointer towards the epistemological foundations of the site). It feels cringe to read that basically if I don't get the sequences lessWrong might rate limit me. But it is good to be open about it. I don't think the EA forum's core philosophy is as easily expressed. > If you see me or other LW moderators fail to judge people on epistemological principles but instead see us directly rate-limiting or banning users on the basis of object-level opinions that even if they seem wrong seem to have been arrived at via relatively sane principles, then I do really think you should complain and push back at us. I see my mandate as head of LW to only extend towards enforcing what seems to me the shared epistemological foundation of LW, and to not have the mandate to enforce my own object-level beliefs on the participants of this site. > > Now some more comments on the object-level:  > > I overall feel good about rate-limiting everyone on the above list. I think it will probably make the conversations on the site go better and make more people contribute to the site.  > > Us doing more extensive rate-limiting is an experiment, and we will see how it goes. As kave said in the other response to this post, the rule that suggested these specific rate-limits does not seem like it has an amazing track record, though I currently endorse it as something that calls things to my attention (among many other heuristics). > > Also, if anyone reading this is worried about being rate-limited or banned in the future, feel free to reach out to me or other moderators on Intercom. I am generally happy to give people direct and frank feedback about their contributions to the site, as well as how likely I am to take future moderator actions. Uncertainty is costly, and I think it's worth a lot of my time to help people understand to what degree investing in LessWrong makes sense for them. 

I am not confident that another FTX level crisis is less likely to happen, other than that we might all say "oh this feels a bit like FTX". Changes: * Board swaps. Yeah maybe good, though many of the people who left were very experienced. And it's not clear whether there are due diligence people (which seems to be what was missing). * Orgs being spun out of EV and EV being shuttered. I mean, maybe good though feels like it's swung too far. Many mature orgs should run on their own, but small orgs do have many replicable features. * More talking about honesty. Not really sure this was the problem. The issue wasn't the median EA it was in the tails. Are the tails of EA more honest? Hard to say * We have now had a big crisis so it's less costly to say "this might be like that big crisis". Though notably this might also be too cheap - we could flinch away from doing ambitious things * Large orgs seem slightly more beholden to comms/legal to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing. * OpenPhil is hiring more internally Non-changes: * Still very centralised. I'm pretty pro-elite, so I'm not sure this is a problem in and of itself, though I have come to think that elites in general are less competent than I thought before (see FTX and OpenAI crisis) * Little discussion of why or how the affiliation with SBF happened despite many well connected EAs having a low opinion of him * Little discussion of what led us to ignore the base rate of scamminess in crypto and how we'll avoid that in future

Why are April Fools jokes still on the front page? On April 1st, you expect to see April Fools' posts and know you have to be extra cautious when reading strange things online. However, April 1st was 13 days ago and there are still two posts that are April Fools posts on the front page. I think it should be clarified that they are April Fools jokes so people can differentiate EA weird stuff from EA weird stuff that's a joke more easily. Sure, if you check the details you'll see that things don't add up, but we all know most people just read the title or first few paragraphs.

Given that effective altruism is "a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice"[1] it seems surprisingly rare to me that people actually do the hard work of: 1. (Systematically) exploring cause areas 2. Writing up their (working hypothesis of a) ranked or tiered list, with good reasoning transparency 3. Sharing their list and reasons publicly.[2] The lists I can think of that do this best are by 80,000 Hours, Open Philanthropy's, and CEARCH's list. Related things I appreciate, but aren't quite what I'm envisioning: * Tools and models like those by Rethink Priorities and Mercy For Animals, though they're less focused on explanation of specific prioritisation decisions. * Longlists of causes by Nuno Sempere and CEARCH, though these don't provide ratings, rankings, and reasoning. * Various posts pitching a single cause area and giving reasons to consider it a top priority without integrating it into an individual or organisation's broader prioritisation process. There are also some lists of cause area priorities from outside effective altruism / the importance, neglectedness, tractability framework, although these often lack any explicit methodology, e.g. the UN, World Economic Forum, or the Copenhagen Consensus. If you know of other public writeups and explanations of ranked lists, please share them in the comments![3] 1. ^ Of course, this is only one definition. But my impression is that many definitions share some focus on cause prioritisation, or first working out what doing the most good actually means. 2. ^ I'm a hypocrite of course, because my own thoughts on cause prioritisation are scattered across various docs, spreadsheets, long-forgotten corners of my brain... and not at all systematic or thorough. I think I roughly: - Came at effective altruism with a hypothesis of a top cause area based on arbitrary and contingent factors from my youth/adolescence (ending factory farming),  - Had that hypothesis worn down by various information and arguments I encountered and changed my views on the top causes - Didn't ever go back and do a systemic cause prioritisation exercise from first principles (e.g. evaluating cause candidates from a long-list that includes 'not-core-EA™-cause-areas' or based on criteria other than ITN). I suspect this is pretty common. I also worry people are deferring too much on what is perhaps the most fundamental question of the EA project. 3. ^ Rough and informal explanations welcome. I'd especially welcome any suggestions that come from a different methodology or set of worldviews & assumptions to 80k and Open Phil. I ask partly because I'd like to be able to share multiple different perspectives when I introduce people to cause prioritisation to avoid creating pressure to defer to a single list.

Please advertise applications at least 4 weeks before closing! (more for fellowships!) I've seen a lot of cool job postings, fellowships, or other opportunities that post that applications are open the forum or on 80k ~10 days before closing.  Because many EA roles or opportunities often get cross-posted to other platforms or newsletters, and there's a built in lag-time between the original post and the secondary platform, this is especially relevant to EA. For fellowships or similar training programs, where so much work has gone into planning and designing the program ahead of time, I would really encourage to open applications ~2 months before closing.  Keep in mind that most forum posts don't stay on the frontpage very long, so "posting something on the forum" does not equal "the EA community has seen this". As someone who runs a local group and a newsletter, opportunities with short application times are almost always missed by my community, since there's not enough turnaround time between when we see the original post, the next newsletter, and time for community members to apply.

Im intrigued where people stand on the threshold where farmed animal lives might become net positive? I'm going to share a few scenarios i'm very unsure about and id love to hear thoughts or be pointed towards research on this. 1. Animals kept in homesteads in rural Uganda where I live. Often they stay inside with the family at night, then are let out during the day to roam free along the farm or community. The animals seem pretty darn happy most of the time for what it's worth, playing and galavanting around. Downsides here include poor veterinary care so sometimes parasites and sickness are pretty bad and often pretty rough transport and slaughter methods (my intuition net positive). 2. Grass fed sheep in New Zealand, my birth country. They get good medical care, are well fed on grass and usually have large roaming areas (intuition net positive) 3. Grass fed dairy cows in New Zealand. They roam fairly freely and will have very good vet care, but have they calves taken away at birth, have constantly uncomfortably swollen udders and are milked at least twice daily. (Intuition very unsure) 4. Free range pigs. Similar to the above except often space is smaller but they do get little houses. Pigs are far more intelligent than cows or sheep and might have more intellectual needs not getting met. (Intuition uncertain) Obviously these kind of cases make up a small proportion of farmed animals worldwide, with the predominant situation - factory farmed animals likely having net negative lives. I know that animals having net positive lives far from justifies farming animals on it's own, but it seems important for my own decision making and for standing on solid ground while talking with others about animal suffering. Thanks for your input.

Could it be more important to improve human values than to make sure AI is aligned? Consider the following (which is almost definitely oversimplified):   ALIGNED AI MISALIGNED AI HUMANITY GOOD VALUES UTOPIA EXTINCTION HUMANITY NEUTRAL VALUES NEUTRAL WORLD EXTINCTION HUMANITY BAD VALUES DYSTOPIA EXTINCTION For clarity, let’s assume dystopia is worse than extinction. This could be a scenario where factory farming expands to an incredibly large scale with the aid of AI, or a bad AI-powered regime takes over the world. Let's assume neutral world is equivalent to extinction. The above shows that aligning AI can be good, bad, or neutral. The value of alignment exactly depends on humanity’s values. Improving humanity’s values however is always good.  The only clear case where aligning AI beats improving humanity’s values is if there isn’t scope to improve our values further. An ambiguous case is whenever humanity has positive values in which case both improving values and aligning AI are good options and it isn’t immediately clear to me which wins. The key takeaway here is that improving values is robustly good whereas aligning AI isn’t - alignment is bad if we have negative values. I would guess that we currently have pretty bad values given how we treat non-human animals and alignment is therefore arguably undesirable. In this simple model, improving values would become the overwhelmingly important mission. Or perhaps ensuring that powerful AI doesn't end up in the hands of bad actors becomes overwhelmingly important (again, rather than alignment). This analysis doesn’t consider the moral value of AI itself. It also assumed that misaligned AI necessarily leads to extinction which may not be accurate (perhaps it can also lead to dystopian outcomes?). I doubt this is a novel argument, but what do y’all think?