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

I recently wrote a post on the EA forum about turning animal suffering to animal bliss using genetic enhancement. Titotal raised an thoughtful concern: "How do you check that your intervention is working? For example, suppose your original raccoons screech when you poke them, but the genetically engineered racoons don't. Is that because they are experiencing less pain, or have they merely evolved not to screech?" This is a very good point. I was recently considering how we could be sure to not just change the expressions of suffering and I believe that I have determined a means of doing so. In psychology, it is common to use factor analysis to study a latent variables--the variables that we cannot measure directly. It seems extremely reasonable to think that animal pain is real, but the trouble is measuring it. We could try to get at pain by getting a huge array of behaviors and measures that are associated with pain (heart rate, cortisol levels, facial expressions, vocalizations, etc.) and find a latent factor of suffering that accounts for some of these behaviors. To determine if an intervention is successful at changing the latent factor of suffering for the better, we could test for measurement invariance which is an important step in making a relevant comparison between two groups. This basically tests whether the nature of the factor loadings remains the same between groups. This would mean a reduction in all of the traits associated with suffering. This would also seem relevant for environmental interventions as well.  As an illustration: imagine that I measure wefare of a raccoon by the amount of screeching it does. A bad intervention would be taping the raccoons mouth shut. This would reduce screeching, but there is no good reason to think that would alleviate suffering. However, imagine I gave the raccoon a drug and it acted less stressed, screeched less, had less cortisol, and started acting much more friendly. This would be much better evidence of true reduction in suffering.  There is much more to be defended in my thesis but this felt like a thought worth sharing.

From a utilitarian perspective, it would seem there are substantial benefits to accurate measures of welfare.  I was listening to Adam Mastroianni discuss the history of trying measure happiness and life satisfaction and it was interesting to find a level of stability across the decades. Could it really be that the increases in material wealth do not result in huge objective increases in happiness and satisfaction for humans? It would seem the efforts to increase GDP and improve standard of living beyond the basics may be misdirected. Furthermore, it seems like it would be extremely helpful in terms of policy creation to have an objective unit like a util.  We could compare human and animal welfare directly, and genetically engineer animals to increase their utils.  While efforts might not super successful, it would seem very important to merely improve objective measures of wellbeing by say 10%.

Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone - MIT Technology review.  Should the EA forum still recommend to use an AI generated picture for a post's preview image? https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/