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...
I might be biased (same school, tried something similar in physics), but great work! I recommend promoting the Olympiads nationally once they're stable, so more students can benefit. I believe (not super confident about this, though) that the private tutoring market in Egypt can absorb a lot of demand from students wanting to participate in Science Olympiads, so you shouldn't (at least in my opinion) try to train students en masse; just create the incentive. No idea how you can do that, though-- I assume social media is the cheapest method?
Also, not trying to bring you down, but Egypt's bureaucracy is hell (you probably know this already). If you manage to launch just one Olympiad and keep it stable for 1-2 years, that's fantastic. If you ever feel like you're hitting too many walls, it's totally fine to rethink the whole project and invest your time in other (more impactful) ones
Good luck!