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.

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. 

Quick poll [✅ / ❌]: Do you feel like you don't have a good grasp of Shapley values, despite wanting to?  (Context for after voting: I'm trying to figure out if more explainers of this would be helpful. I still feel confused about some of its implications, despite having spent significant time trying to understand it)

I intend to strong downvote any article about EA that someone posts on here that they themselves have no positive takes on.  If I post an article, I have some reason I liked it. Even a single line. Being critical isn't enough on it's own. If someone posts an article, without a single quote they like, with the implication it's a bad article, I am minded to strong downvote so that noone else has to waste their time on it. 

Do you believe that altruism actually makes people happy? Peter Singer's book argues that people become happier by behaving altruistically, and psychoanalysis also classifies altruism as a mature defense mechanism. However, there are also concerns about pathological altruism and people pleasers. In-depth research data on this is desperately needed.

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.

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).

Dustin Moskovitz claims "Tesla has committed consumer fraud on a massive scale", and "people are going to jail at the end" https://www.threads.net/@moskov/post/C6KW_Odvky0/ Not super EA relevant, but I guess relevant inasmuch as Moskovitz funds us and Musk has in the past too. I think if this were just some random commentator I wouldn't take it seriously at all, but a bit more inclined to believe Dustin will take some concrete action. Not sure I've read everything he's said about it, I'm not used to how Threads works

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.

I can't find a better place to ask this, but I was wondering whether/where there is a good explanation of the scepticism of leading rationalists about animal consciousness/moral patienthood. I am thinking in particular of Zvi and Yudkowsky. In the recent podcast with Zvi Mowshowitz on 80K, the question came up a bit, and I know he is also very sceptical of interventions for non-human animals on his blog, but I had a hard time finding a clear explanation of where this belief comes from. I really like Zvi's work, and he has been right about a lot of things I was initially on the other side of, so I would be curious to read more of his or similar people's thoughts on this. Seems like potentially a place where there is a motivation gap: non-animal welfare people have little incentive to convince me that they think the things I work on are not that useful.

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!

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.

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. 

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

Please people, do not treat Richard Hannania as some sort of worthy figure who is a friend of EA. He was a Nazi, and whilst he claims he moderated his views, he is still very racist as far as I can tell. Hannania called for trying to get rid of all non-white immigrants in the US, and the sterilization of everyone with an IQ under 90 indulged in antisemitic attacks on the allegedly Jewish elite, and even post his reform was writing about the need for the state to harass and imprison Black people specifically ('a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hanania).  Yet in the face of this, and after he made an incredibly grudging apology about his most extreme stuff (after journalists dug it up), he's been invited to Manifiold's events and put on Richard Yetter Chappel's blogroll.  DO NOT DO THIS. If you want people to distinguish benign transhumanism (which I agree is a real thing*) from the racist history of eugenics, do not fail to shun actual racists and Nazis. Likewise, if you want to promote "decoupling" factual beliefs from policy recommendations, which can be useful, do not duck and dive around the fact that virtually every major promoter of scientific racism ever, including allegedly mainstream figures like Jensen, worked with or published with actual literal Nazis (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/arthur-jensen).  I love most of the people I have met through EA, and I know that-despite what some people say on twitter- we are not actually a secret crypto-fascist movement (nor is longtermism specifically, which whether you like it or not, is mostly about what its EA proponents say it is about.) But there is in my view a disturbing degree of tolerance for this stuff in the community, mostly centered around the Bay specifically. And to be clear I am complaining about tolerance for people with far-right and fascist ("reactionary" or whatever) political views, not people with any particular personal opinion on the genetics of intelligence. A desire for authoritarian government enforcing the "natural" racial hierarchy does not become okay, just because you met the person with the desire at a house party and they seemed kind of normal and chill or super-smart and nerdy.  I usually take a way more measured tone on the forum than this, but here I think real information is given by getting shouty.  *Anyone who thinks it is automatically far-right to think about any kind of genetic enhancement at all should go read some Culture novels, and note the implied politics (or indeed, look up the author's actual die-hard libertarian socialist views.) I am not claiming that far-left politics is innocent, just that it is not racist. 

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.

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!

The meat-eater problem is under-discussed. I've spent more than 500 hours consuming EA content and I had never encountered the meat-eater problem until today. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/meat-eater-problem (I had sometimes thought about the problem, but I didn't even know it had a name)

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

You can now import posts directly from Google docs Plus, internal links to headers[1] will now be mapped over correctly. To import a doc, make sure it is public or shared with "eaforum.posts@gmail.com"[2], then use the widget on the new/edit post page: Importing a doc will create a new (permanently saved) version of the post, but will not publish it, so it's safe to import updates into posts that are already published. You will need to click the "Publish Changes" button to update the live post. Everything that previously worked on copy-paste[3] will also work when importing, with the addition of internal links to headers (which only work when importing). There are still a few things that are known not to work: * Nested bullet points (these are working now) * Cropped images get uncropped * Bullet points in footnotes (these will become separate un-bulleted lines) * Blockquotes (there isn't a direct analog of this in Google docs unfortunately) There might be other issues that we don't know about. Please report any bugs or give any other feedback by replying to this quick take, you can also contact us in the usual ways. Appendix: Version history There are some minor improvements to the version history editor[4] that come along with this update: * You can load a version into the post editor without updating the live post, previously you could only hard-restore versions * The version that is live[5] on the post is shown in bold Here's what it would look like just after you import a Google doc, but before you publish the changes. Note that the latest version isn't bold, indicating that it is not showing publicly: 1. ^ Previously the link would take you back to the original doc, now it will take you to the header within the Forum post as you would expect. Internal links to bookmarks (where you link to a specific text selection) are also partially supported, although the link will only go to the paragraph the text selection is in 2. ^ Sharing with this email address means that anyone can access the contents of your doc if they have the url, because they could go to the new post page and import it. It does mean they can't access the comments at least 3. ^ I'm not sure how widespread this knowledge is, but previously the best way to copy from a Google doc was to first "Publish to the web" and then copy-paste from this published version. In particular this handles footnotes and tables, whereas pasting directly from a regular doc doesn't. The new importing feature should be equal to this publish-to-web copy-pasting, so will handle footnotes, tables, images etc. And then it additionally supports internal links 4. ^ Accessed via the "Version history" button in the post editor 5. ^ For most intents and purposes you can think of "live" as meaning "showing publicly". There is a bit of a sharp corner in this definition, in that the post as a whole can still be a draft. To spell this out: There can be many different versions of a post body, only one of these is attached to the post, this is the "live" version. This live version is what shows on the non-editing view of the post. Independently of this, the post as a whole can be a draft or published.

David Nash's Monthly Overload of Effective Altruism seems highly underrated, and you should most probably give it a follow. I don't think any other newsletter captures and highlights EA's cause-neutral impartial beneficence better than the Monthly Overload of EA. For example, this month's newsletter has updates about Conferences, Virtual Events, Meta-EA, Effective Giving, Global Health and Development, Careers, Animal Welfare, Organization updates, Grants, Biosecurity, Emissions & CO2 Removal, Environment, AI Safety, AI Governance, AI in China, Improving Institutions, Progress, Innovation & Metascience, Longtermism, Forecasting, Miscellaneous causes and links, Stories & EA Around the World, Good News, and more. Compiling all this must be hard work! Until September 2022, the monthly overloads were also posted on the Forum and received higher engagement than the Substack. I find the posts super informative, so I am giving the newsletter a shout-out and putting it back on everyone's radar!

The government's sentencing memorandum for SBF is here; it is seeking a sentence of 40-50 years. As typical for DOJ in high-profile cases, it is well-written and well-done. I'm not just saying that because it makes many of the same points I identified in my earlier writeup of SBF's memorandum. E.g., p. 8 ("doubling down" rather than walking away from the fraud); p. 43 ("paid in full" claim is highly misleading) [page cites to numbers at bottom of page, not to PDF page #]. EA-adjacent material: There's a snarky reference to SBF's charitable donations "(for which he still takes credit)" (p. 2) in the intro, and the expected hammering of SBF's memo for taking credit for attempting to take credit for donations paid with customer money (p. 95). There's a reference to SBF's "idiosyncratic . . . beliefs around altruism, utilitarianism, and expected value" (pp. 88-89). This leads to the one surprise theme (for me): the need to incapacitate SBF from committing additional crimes (pp. 87, 90). Per the feds, "the defendant believed and appears still to believe that it is rational and necessary for him to take great risks including imposing those risks on others, if he determines that it will serve what he personally deems a worthy project or goal," which contributes to his future dangerousness (p. 89). For predictors: Looking at sentences where the loss was > $100MM and the method was Ponzi/misappropriation/embezzlement, there's a 20-year, two 30-years, a bunch of 40-years, three 50-years, and three 100+-years (pp. 96-97). Interesting item: The government has gotten about $3.45MM back from political orgs, and the estate has gotten back ~$280K (pp. 108-09). The proposed forfeiture order lists recipients, and seems to tell us which ones returned monies to the government (Proposed Forfeiture Order, pp. 24-43). Life Pro Tip: If you are arrested by the feds, do not subsequently write things in Google Docs that you don't want the feds to bring up at your sentencing. Jotting down the idea that "SBF died for our sins" as some sort of PR idea (p. 88; source here) is particularly ill-advised.  My Take: In Judge Kaplan's shoes, I would probably sentence at the high end of the government's proposed range. Where the actual loss will likely be several billion, and the loss would have been even greater under many circumstances, I don't think a consequence of less than two decades' actual time in prison would provide adequate general deterrence -- even where the balance of other factors was significantly mitigating. That would imply a sentence of ~25 years after a prompt guilty plea. Backsolving, that gets us a sentence of ~35 years without credit for a guilty plea. But the balance of other factors is aggravating, not mitigating. Stealing from lots of ordinary people is worse than stealing from sophisticated investors. Outright stealing by someone in a fiduciary role is worse than accounting fraud to manipulate stock prices. We also need to adjust upward for SBF's post-arrest conduct, including trying to hide money from the bankruptcy process, multiple attempts at witness tampering, and perjury on the stand. Stacking those factors would probably take me over 50 years, but like the government I don't think a likely-death-in-prison sentence is necessary here.

SBF's sentencing memorandum is here. On the first page of the intro, we get some quotes about SBF's philanthropy. On the next, we are told he "lived a very modest life" and that any reports of extravagance are fabrications. [N.B.: All page citations are to the typed numbers at the bottom, not to the PDF page number.]  For the forecasters: based on Guidelines calculations in the pre-sentence report (PSR) by Probation, the Guidelines range is 110 years (would be life, but is capped at the statutory max). Probation recommended 100 years. PSRs are sealed, so we'll never see the full rationale on that. The average fraud defendant with a maxed-out offense level, no criminal history, and no special cooperation credit receives a sentence of 283 months. The first part of the memo is about the (now advisory) Sentencing Guidelines used in federal court. The major argument is that there should be no upward adjustment for loss because everyone is probably getting all their money back. Courts have traditionally looked at the greater of actual or "intended" loss, but the memo argues that isn't correct after a recent Supreme Court decision.  As a factual matter, I'm skeptical that the actual loss is $0, especially where much of the improvement is due to increases in the crypto market that customers would have otherwise benefitted from directly. Plus everyone getting money back (including investors who were defrauded) is far from a certain outcome, the appellate courts have been deferential to best-guess loss calculations, and the final Guidelines range would not materially change if the loss amount were (say) $25MM. If I'm the district judge here, I'd probably include some specific statements and findings in my sentencing monologue in an attempt to insulate this issue from appeal. Such as: I'd impose the same sentence no matter what the Guidelines said, because $0 dramatically understates the offense severity and $10B overstates it. There are a few places in which the argument ventures into tone-deaf waters. The argument that SBF wasn't in a position of public or private trust (p. 25-26) seems awfully weak and ill-advised to my eyes. The discussion of possible equity-holder losses (pp. 20-21) also strikes me as dismissive at points. No, equity holders don't get a money-back guarantee, but they are entitled to not be lied to when deciding where to invest. The second half involves a discussion of the so-called 3553 factors that a court must consider in determining a sentence that is sufficient, but not greater than necessary. Pages 41-42 discuss Peter Singer and earning to give, while pages 46-50 continue on about SBF's philanthropy (including a specific reference to GWWC and link to the pledger list on page 46).  Throughout the memo, the defense asserts that FTX was different from various other schemes that were fraudulent from day one (e.g., p. 56). My understanding is that the misuse of customer funds started pretty early in FTX's history, so I don't give this much weight. The memo asserts that SBF was less culpable than various comparators, ranging from Madoff himself (150 years) to Elizabeth Holmes (135 months) (pp. 73-80). The bottom-line request is for a sentence of 63-78 months, which is the Guidelines range if one accepts the loss amount as $0 (p. 89). There are 29 letters in SBF's support by family members, his psychiatrist, Ross Rheingans-Yoo, Kat Woods, and a bunch of names I don't recognize. [Caution: The remainder of this post contains more opinion-laden commentary than what has preceded it!] I generally find the 3553 discussion unpersuasive. The section on "remorse" (pp. 55-56) rings hollow to me, although this is an unavoidable consequence of SBF's trial litigation choices. There is "remorse" that people were injured and impliedly that SBF made various errors in judgment, but there isn't any acknowledgment of wrongdoing. One sentence of note to this audience: "Sam is simply devastated that the advice, mentorship, and funding that he has given to the animal welfare, global poverty, and pandemic prevention movements does not begin to counteract the damage done to them by virtue of their association with him." (p. 55).  I find the discussion of the FTX Foundation to be jarring, such as "Ultimately, the FTX Foundation donated roughly $150 million to charities working on issues such as pandemic prevention, animal welfare, and funding anti-malarial mosquito netting in Africa." (p. 57). Attempting to take credit for sending some of the money you took from customers to charity takes a lot of nerve!  Although the memo asserts that SBF's neurodiversity makes him "uniquely vulnerable" in prison (p. 58), the unfortunate truth is that many convicted criminals have characteristics that make successfully adapting to prison life more difficult than for the average person (e.g., severe mental illness, unusually low intelligence). So I'm not convinced by the memo that he would face an atypical burden that would warrant serious consideration in sentencing.  Although I certainly can't fault counsel for pointing to SBF's positive characteristics, I'm sure Judge Kaplan knows that many of his opportunities to legibly display these characteristics have been enabled by privilege that most people being sentenced in federal court do not have. I'm also not generally convinced by the arguments about general deterrence. In abbreviated form, the argument is that running SBF through the ringer and exposing him to public disgrace is strong enough that a lower sentence (and the inevitable lifetime public stigma) suffices to deter other would-be fraudsters. See pp. 66-67. And there's good evidence that severity of punishment is relatively less important in deterrence.  However, if a tough sentence is otherwise just, I don't think we need a high probability of deterrent effect for an extremely serious offense for extended incarceration to be worth it. Crypto scams are common, and as a practical matter it is difficult to increase certainty and speed of punishment because so much of the problematic conduct happens outside the U.S. So severity is the lever the government has. Moreover, discounts for offenders who have a lot to lose (because they are wealthy already) and/or are seen as having more future productive value seem backward as far as moral desert.  Finally, I think there's potentially value in severity deterrence of someone already committing fraud; if the punishment level is basically maxed out at the $500M customer money you've already put at risk, there is no reason (other than an increased risk of detection) not to put $5B at risk. As the saying goes, "might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb" as the penalty for ovine theft was death either way. Defense recommendations on sentencing are generally unrealistic in cases without specific types of plea deal. This one is no different. Also, the sentencing discussion will sound extremely harsh to at least non-US readers . . . but that's the situation in the US and especially in the federal system. I'd note that SBF's post-arrest decisions will likely have triggered a substantial portion of his sentence. Much has been written about the US "trial penalty," and it is often a problem. However, I don't think a discount of ~25-33% for a prompt guilty plea, as implied by the Guidelines for most offenses (also by the guidelines used in England and Wales) is penologically unjustified or coercive. Instead of that, SBF's sentence is likely to be higher because of multiple attempts at witness tampering and evasive, incredible testimony on the stand. So he could be looking at ~double the sentence he would be facing if he had pled guilty.  He likely could not have gotten the kind of credit for cooperation his co-conspirators received (a "5K.1") because there was no other big fish to rat out. Providing 5K.1 cooperation often reduces sentences by a lot, in my opinion often too much. Given the 5K.1 cooperation and the lesser role, one must exercise caution in using co-conspirator sentences to estimate what SBF would have received if he had promptly accepted responsibility. Finally, I'd view any sentence over ~60 years as de facto life and chosen more for symbolic purposes than to actually increase punishment. Currently, one can receive a ~15% discount for decent behavior in prison, and can potentially serve ~25-33% of the sentence in a halfway house or the like for participating in programs under the First Step Act. It's hard to predict what the next few decades will bring as far as sentencing policy, but the recent trend has been toward expanding the possibilities for early release. So I'd estimate that SBF will actually serve ~75% of his sentence, and probably some portion of it outside of a prison.

If anyone wants to see what making EA enormous might look like, check out Rutger Bregmans' School for Moral Ambition (SMA).  It isn't an EA project (and his accompanying book has a chapter on EA that is quite critical), but the inspiration is clear and I'm sure there will be things we can learn from it.  For their pilot, they're launching in the Netherlands, but it's already pretty huge, and they have plans to launch in the UK and the US next year.  To give you an idea of size, despite the official launch being only yesterday, their growth on LinkedIn is significant. For the 90 days preceding the launch date, they added 13,800 followers (their total is now 16,300). The two EA orgs with the biggest LinkedIn presence I know of are 80k and GWWC. In the same period, 80k gained 1,200 followers (their total is now 18,400), and GWWC gained 700 (their total is now 8,100).[1] And it's not like SMA has been spamming the post button. They only posted 4 times. The growth in followers comes from media coverage and the founding team posting about it on their personal LinkedIn pages (Bregman has over 200k followers).  1. ^ EA Netherlands gained 137, giving us a total of 2900 - wooo!