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...
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
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...
In July 2022, Jeff Masters wrote an article (https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/07/the-future-of-global-catastrophic-risk-events-from-climate-change/) summarizing findings from a United Nations report on the increasing risks of global catastrophic risk (GCR) events due to climate change. The report defines GCRs as catastrophes that kill over 10 million people or cause over $10 trillion in damage. It warned that by increasingly pushing beyond safe planetary boundaries, human activity is boosting the odds of climate-related GCRs.
The article argued that societies are more vulnerable to sudden collapse when multiple environmental shocks occur, and that the combination of climate change impacts poses a serious risk of total societal collapse if we continue business as usual.
Although the article and report are from mid-2022, the scientific community has been messaging that climate change effects are increasing faster than models predicted. So I'm curious - what has the EA community been doing over the past year to understand, prepare for and mitigate these climate-related GCRs? Some questions I have:
I'm very interested to hear others' thoughts. While a lot of great climate-related work is happening in EA, I worry that climate GCRs remain relatively neglected compared to other GCRs.
I feel like this would be a good post. It might get unfairly buried as a quick take.