Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I want to start by noting that I am amazed and somewhat in awe of what's been accomplished by the EA animal welfare movement. I am enthusiastically supportive of all campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals.
I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm proud of that work.
That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change.&n...
The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time
Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.
I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn...
Precommitting based on Survey Outcomes for Proposed "Giving Effectively Israel.
(Epistemic Status: Public Statement for Future Reference)
We're planning to field a survey about current giving, and potentially funding a Israeli-tax-deductible organization. The first question is whether there is sufficient demand to make funding the program worthwhile.
Setting this up involves a fair amount of upfront costs for lawyers to ensure that this is entirely above board. It seems worthwhile to try to engage a relatively prestigious / respected firm, to ensure that this is done correctly. There is a risk that we find out that they don't think it's possible to do (subjective estimate: 25%), in which case we would stop the project, hopefully having spent less than the expected full cost.
My upfront claim is that this would be worthwhile to seek funding for if the cost of a lawyer and setting up the nonprofit is less than 25% of the expected tax-saving to EAs over the next 3 years, as inferred from the survey.
Update: The total raised by Israeli EAs from the survey is on the order of 100,000 NIS, or about $30,000 now, which I think could plausibly double or even triple once started, at least in the next couple years. Given that tax rebates in Israel are a flat 35%, the planned organization would save Israeli EAs 35,000 NIS / $10,000 annually now, and 2-3 times as much in the coming few years. If there are very low administrative costs, this is plausibly enough that it is worth having on a utilitarian calculus basis, as outlined in my above pre-commitment, IF there were someone suitable to run it that had enough time and / or was willing to work cheaply enough.
However, given the value of my time working on other things, however, it is not enough for me to think that I should run the organization.
To get this started, I do have ideas I'm happy to share about what needs to be done, and the growth potential makes a strong case for this to be investigated further. AT the same time, I think it's worse for someone ineffective / not aligned to start this than to simply wait until the need is larger, so I am deferring on this.