I hastily vibecoded a ~live-updating EA Forum (posts + comments; I think users are static) database + semantic search because software is ~free now. I haven't rigorously checked anything over because it was/is just a random side project so use at your own risk and discretion. Enjoy!

Full database is ~17GB 

Link: https://eaforum.up.railway.app/

From Reuters:

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 25 (Reuters) - ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation that will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board, people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a move that will make the company more attractive to investors.

I sincerely hope OpenPhil (or Effective Ventures, or both - I don't know the minutia here) sues over this. Read the reasoning for and details of the $30M grant here. 

The case for a legal challenge seems hugely overdetermined to me:

• Stop/delay/complicate the restructuring, and otherwise make life appropriately hard for Sam Altman
• Settle for a large huge amount of money that can be used to do a huge amount of good
• Signal that you can't just blatantly take advantage of OpenPhil/EV/EA as you please without appropriate challenge

I know OpenPhil has a pretty hands-off ethos and vibe; this shouldn't stop them from acting with integrity when hands-on legal action is clearly warranted

Re the grand “does individual giving/etg still matter post Anthropic IPO” question:

I think it pushes towards individuals acting more like grantmakers themselves. Anthropic billionaires don’t know about your Twitter follower who could do something great with $1k and they aren’t gonna have the capacity to find out, but you do! 

There are just a lot of freedoms one has as an individual donor who isn’t a public figure:

You…

• Don’t have to justify yourself on the EA Forum to friends and colleagues for something illegible
• Know about lots of random things that others don’t, like which of your friends you trust to do a good job at X Y or Z
• Don’t have to worry about smear campaigns or hostile journalists bc nobody is going to know or care how you spent $2k
• Can own whatever reputational stuff there is if you want to (or not, your call)
• Probably don’t have to worry about the community-level effects of some policy unless you’re giving away say at least 6 figures/year and probably more like 7
• Can set arbitrary terms and conditions like “here’s a bounty that I’ll pay out at my own discretion”
• Don’t have to worry about giving some project or other entity any sort of reputation
• Regrant to your trusted friend who finds micro-granting fun and interesting
• Probably can do other cool things I’m not thinking of rn

Also: the same dynamic between Anthropic ~billionaires and folks reading this as a group also holds within that latter group: there are diminishing returns even at low margins so Jane Street should look a little less good than it used to (still pretty good tbc) and “having a couple thousand bucks around and being on the lookout for one-off opportunities” should seem a bit better than it used to. 

New interview with Will MacAskill by @MHR🔸

Almost a year after the 2024 holiday season Twitter fundraiser, we managed to score a very exciting "Mystery EA Guest" to interview: Will MacAskill himself.

• @MHR🔸 was the very talented interviewer and shrimptastic fashion icon
• Thanks to @AbsurdlyMax🔹 for help behind the scenes
• And of course huge thanks to Will for agreeing to do this

Summary, highlights, and transcript below video!

Summary and Highlights

(summary AI-generated) 

Effective Altruism has changed significantly since its inception. With the arrival of "mega donors" and major institutional changes, does individual effective giving still matter in 2025?

Will MacAskill—co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism and Giving What We Can, and currently a senior research fellow at the Forethought Institute—says the answer is a resounding yes. In fact, he argues that despite the resources currently available, individuals are "systematically not ambitious enough" relative to the scale of the problems the world faces.

In this special interview for the 2025 EA Twitter Fundraiser, Will joins host Matt to discuss the evolution of the movement’s focus. They discuss why animal welfare—specifically the fight against factory farming—has risen in prominence relative to global health, and why Will believes those working on it are "on the right side of history."

Will also shares updates from his current work at the Forethought Institute, where he is moving beyond standard AI safety concerns to focus on "model character"—the idea that as AI agents become more autonomous, their embedded ethics and personality will determine how our economy and society function.

Matt and Will discuss:

• Why "mega donors" haven't made individual giving obsolete
• The "founder effect" that initially prioritized global health over animal welfare
• The funniest moment from the What We Owe the Future media tour (involving Tyler Cowen)
• Why Forethought is focused on the moral status of digital beings
• Will’s call for the community to embrace an "impartial, altruistic scout mindset" on social media

Highlights

On earning to give:

Then, should people be more ambitious [about earning to give]? I genuinely think yes. I think people systematically aren't ambitious enough, so the answer is almost always yes. Again, the ambition you have should match the scale of the problems that we’re facing—and the scale of those problems is very large indeed.

On current, most exciting work at Forethought:

Maybe the thing I’ll emphasize most at the moment... is the idea of "model character" or AI personality.

There is now OpenAI, which has this "Model Spec," and then Claude’s "soul" was leaked. Basically, these companies are having to make decisions about how these AIs behave. That affects hundreds of millions of people every day already. And then in the future, it will determine how our most active economic agents in the world act.

There’s a real spectrum that you can imagine between AI that is as maximally like a tool as possible—just an obedient servant—versus an AI that actually has its own sense of ethics and own conscience. Once you’ve got that, then take every single hairy ethical issue or important circumstance the AIs will face; we really should be thinking in advance about how we want them to behave. I’d be keen for a lot more thought to be going into that.

On what he'd tell EA Twitter:

The main thing is just that I have been loving what I’ve been seeing as a resurgence in EA activity online—on Substack and Twitter in particular. If you think I haven't been following along with popcorn on the Andy Masley data center water usage story, you would be wrong.

Honestly, I just love seeing more people really coming out to bat for EA ideas, demonstrating EA ideas on all sorts of topics...

Transcript

MATT
Hello everyone and welcome. I’m Matt from the 2025 EA Twitter Fundraiser. I’m here with Will MacAskill himself, who likely needs no introduction for folks watching this. But in case anyone does, Will is a senior research fellow at the Forethought Institute and former associate professor at Oxford University. He co-founded Giving What We Can and the Centre for Effective Altruism. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Doing Good Better, What We Owe the Future, and my personal favorite, An Introduction to Utilitarianism. Thank you for joining us, Will.

WILL

Thanks for the interview.

MATT

We’re doing this in service of promoting effective giving. To start us off, we were curious to ask: What do you think the role of effective giving should be in the EA community in 2025? And maybe in particular, should people be more ambitious with trying to earn to give?

WILL

Yes. I think of effective giving as a core part of Effective Altruism. It was the start of it all, and it continues to be important. It continues to be important even if you see "mega donors" coming on the scene, because there are often a lot of things that individuals can fund that the mega donors can’t. And even taking the mega donors into account, there are still enormous problems in the world that they are not going to be able to solve.

Then, should people be more ambitious? I genuinely think yes. I think people systematically aren't ambitious enough, so the answer is almost always yes. Again, the ambition you have should match the scale of the problems that we’re facing—and the scale of those problems is very large indeed.

MATT

Absolutely. One of those big problems—and the one that we’re raising money for in this year’s online fundraiser—is specifically farmed animal welfare. That’s something that has been really popular with highly engaged EAs recently. If you look at, for example, the donation election on the Forum, you’ll see there’s really a lot of enthusiasm around that. However, it is something that has historically played a smaller role in public EA messaging. Do you think that’s a good balance, or is that something that you would like to see change?

WILL

I definitely think that there was never some grand plan of reducing the focus on animal welfare. I and some others really got in via global health and development, so I think that really set the stage—there is a bit of a founder effect there. And then I think it's also just the case that maybe there is naturally wider reach because more people are concerned [about human-centric causes].

But yes, I’d be down for that to change. The problem of factory farming is just so stark and so unnecessary. The arguments for [addressing] it are so good.

I remember when I became vegetarian twenty years ago—I’m getting old now—I got a lot of pushback. It was quite a weird thing to do. People thought it was "holier than thou." It was like you were morally grandstanding or judging others at the time. That has changed. Now, regarding the people who are vegetarian or vegan who really care about animal welfare, it’s just clear that these are the good people. They are on the right side of history.

The amount of good that you can do is just absolutely enormous; the sheer amount you can affect is huge. So, yes, I’d love to see that rise in prominence.

MATT

Very cool. When I was doing some research for this, I was looking back at old versions of the 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can websites on the Wayback Machine. I was surprised that the first-ever archive of the 80,000 Hours page has farmed animal welfare as one of the issues on there. So, you mentioned the founder effect, but I was pleasantly surprised to see just how early this was getting into EA messaging.

WILL

We all cared. I was vegetarian. Little known fact: I and others at 80,000 Hours helped to set up Animal Charity Evaluators.

MATT

Yeah, I remember reading that at some point.

WILL

That was because we felt it was a gap at that point—that was in 2012 or something.

MATT

Well, one of the ways that we are trying to promote the fundraiser is leaning into EA memes. That’s certainly something that’s always been fun about the online EA community. Do you have a favorite EA meme that you’ve run across?

WILL

I feel I have many favorites. One is the April Fools' posts naming Giving What We Can "Naming What We Can."

I also feel it’s a shame that Dustin Moskovitz is no longer memeing quite as hard as he used to. But something he did... there was a big debate on Reddit where people were complaining about Wytham Abbey. There was a debate in the comments between who bought it—who owned it. One person was saying it was Will MacAskill, and the other was saying it was Owen Cotton-Barratt—both of which are incorrect. And then someone came in and said, "What if it’s neither of those people, but some mystery third person?"

That commenter, like many threads down into this Reddit post, was Dustin Moskovitz himself, who actually bought it. So, I salute him. Maybe not a meme per se, but part of the same culture.

MATT

Maybe if we lean in, we can get him to participate a little bit more again.

WILL

Maybe.

MATT

You did quite the media blitz for What We Owe the Future. Was there a funniest or most unexpected story you have from that whirlwind tour?

WILL

The thing that leaps out the most is when I was being interviewed by Tyler Cowen. Podcasts normally have a bit of a chat and get a bit of a warm-up. Tyler just immediately goes in: "Okay, so what is something you like that’s ineffective?"

I just couldn't think of an answer. I went completely blank. So this gets edited from the podcast, but there were minutes of me just being like... [silence]. It kind of threw me off for the whole episode, really. It’s not that I only like maximally efficient things, to be clear!

MATT

I sometimes listen to Conversations with Tyler, and yes, he sometimes has that energy where you really feel like he should let the guest take a breather.

WILL

That was right at the start.

MATT

Well, Will, I know you’ve been doing some really exciting work at Forethought these days. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the work that’s going on there and maybe what you’re most excited about?

WILL

Sure. Forethought in general is trying to do research that is as useful as possible in helping the world as a whole navigate the transition to extremely advanced AI—superintelligence. Distinctively, we tend to not focus on the risk of loss of control to AI systems themselves. Our work often hits on that or helps on that, and it’s a big risk—we’re glad that other people are working on it—but I personally don't think that makes up the vast majority of the issues we face.

We are often looking at neglected issues other than that. That can include:

1. The risk of intense concentration of power among humans.
2. The idea that we should be taking seriously the moral status of digital beings themselves and what kind of rights they have.
3. A number of other issues, like how AI will interact with society’s ability to reason well and make good decisions.

Maybe the thing I’ll emphasize most at the moment, because I’m very excited about it from an impact perspective but I think people don’t appreciate it quite enough, is the idea of "model character" or AI personality.

There is now OpenAI, which has this "Model Spec," and then Claude’s "soul" was leaked. Basically, these companies are having to make decisions about how these AIs behave. That affects hundreds of millions of people every day already. And then in the future, it will determine how our most active economic agents in the world act.

There’s a real spectrum that you can imagine between AI that is as maximally like a tool as possible—just an obedient servant—versus an AI that actually has its own sense of ethics and own conscience. Once you’ve got that, then take every single hairy ethical issue or important circumstance the AIs will face; we really should be thinking in advance about how we want them to behave. I’d be keen for a lot more thought to be going into that.

MATT

Absolutely. That seems incredibly important. All right, well to close, is there anything else you want to tell the people of EA Twitter?

WILL

The main thing is just that I have been loving what I’ve been seeing as a resurgence in EA activity online—on Substack and Twitter in particular. If you think I haven't been following along with popcorn on the Andy Masley data center water usage story, you would be wrong.

Honestly, I just love seeing more people really coming out to bat for EA ideas, demonstrating EA ideas on all sorts of topics—whether that’s data center usage or the utter monstrosity of current shrimp factory farming. So I would just love for more people to feel empowered to be shouting about the giving they’re doing, the causes that they’re working on, and demonstrating the impartial, altruistic scout mindset that I think is EA at its best.

MATT

Awesome. Well, you heard it here first, folks: post more.

WILL

And thanks for the fundraiser; thanks to everybody who has contributed. It’s very, very cool to see this.

Matt

Yes, we definitely are really grateful for everyone who has donated so far and who will continue to donate, because the animal welfare fund is awesome and supporting effective animal interventions is a really, really fantastic cause.

All right. Well, thank you, Will, for joining us. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.

WILL

It's been a joy. Cool. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays.

MATT

Merry Christmas.

Does anyone know why @William_MacAskill says he is "not convinced by the shrimp argument" on his recent appearance on Sam Harris's podcast? 
 

SAM HARRIS

So yeah, so this is one area where perhaps my own cynicism creeps in. I worry that any focus on suffering beyond human suffering, it risks confusing enough people so as to damage people's commitment to these principles. So I mean, I'm not, there's zero defense of factory farming coming from me here, but When I see a philosopher who's clearly EA or EA-adjacent arguing on behalf of the welfare of shrimp and claiming that maybe the worst atrocity perpetrated by humans is all of the mistreatment of shrimp because they exist in such numbers and live such terrible lives, one imagines. 

...

WILL MACASKILL

Okay, great. So lots to unpack there. And so I actually personally am not convinced by the shrimp argument. But the thing I want to defend is people really taking ethical, including quite weird-seeming ethical ideas seriously and trying to reason that through for themselves. 

Full unofficial transcript here and video below

I made a tool to play around with how alternatives to the 10% GWWC Pledge default norm might change:

1. How much individuals are "expected" to pay
   1. The idea being that there are functions of income that people would prefer to the 10% pledge behind some relevant veil of ignorance, along the lines of "I don't want to commit 10% of my $30k salary, but I gladly commit 20% of my $200k salary"

2. How much total donation revenue gets collected

   

    

There's some discussion at this Tweet of mine

Some folks pushed back a bit, citing the following:

• The pledge isn't supposed to be revenue maximizing
• A main function of the pledge is to "build the habit of giving" and complexity/higher expectations undermines this
• Many pledgers give >10% - the pledge doesn't set an upper bond

 I don't find these points very convincing...

Some points of my own

• To quote myself: "I think it would be news to most GWWC pledgers that actually the main point is some indirect thing like building habits rather than getting money to effective orgs"
• If the distribution of GWWC pledgers resembles the US distribution of household incomes and then cut implied donations in half to account for individual vs household discrepancy (obviously false but maybe still illustrative assumptions), the roughly 10,000 GWWC pledgers are giving $60M/year
  • That's a lot of money. It matters a lot in absolute terms
  • This isn't a giving game situation where a few college fellowships give $100/semester - there the main effect is indirect, not via the $100 moved. But at $60M/year, even relatively modest % increases matter a lot
• The 10% GWWC pledge functions as a norm that probably has some influence over total amounts given even though folks are free to give as much (or as little, really) as they want.
• The simplicity/memetic fitness of flat 10% is nice, but this has to be weighed against the actual object level consideration of how much money gets moved per year
• Plausibly more folks would take a revised version of the pledge because it's less costly at lower incomes. There's a reason that the US income tax system is progressive!
• Possibly we can have a best of both worlds situation, where the GWWC pledge remains a strong norm but there's a different, mostly compatible system for those so inclined.

• 

  • Tentatively it seems like a progressive system makes sense purely from a money moved POV. This screenshot is from the default settings, which is approximately the curve I endorse

Some design choices to make explicit

• The site is supposed to be about after-tax income, which is what matters insofar as you're open to a non-flat curve
• The site accounts for exactly two variables for simplicity and convenience: (1) metro area to determine cost of living and (2) after-tax income; plenty of other things that would plausibly change the function for the better, such as family size
• The default curve when you load the page is roughly what I personally endorse but I haven't put a ton of thought into it
  • That is: $r=0.99(1-\exp (-0.15\cdot \frac{\ln (I/30000{)}^{1.2}}{0.99}))$
  • You can modify the parameters in a couple different ways

Why adjust for cost of living? 

• The actual reason I chose to do this is that I think there are altruistic benefits to living in major US cities, most notably SF/Bay Area and DC, but also others like NYC and Boston, and so don't want to disincentivize living in those places
  • I realize this is not incredibly principled, maybe this is the wrong call

The site one more time

https://pledge.up.railway.app/ 

I'm not sure this matters at all, but I tentatively think that percent of value of the best possible future, (we can call it 'PVBPF')  which I've heard brought up by Will MacAskill a couple times now^[1] (and maybe by others?) isn't an ideal metric by which to measure or even mental/conceptual model by which to understand how good the world is.

My main concern is illustrated by the following:

• Suppose we do a survey in 100 years^[2] and conclude that the current world is, to our best guess, 50% as good as the best possible counterfactual^[3]. So PVBPF = 50%
• Then somehow we realize that actually there was actually ex ante a $p={10}^{-1,000,000}$ chance of a counterfactual outcome 5 times better than what we previously thought was the maximum of the distribution
• What was originally PVBPF = 50% now becomes  $50\%\ast \left(1/5\right)=1/10$. So PVBPF = 10%

So the addition of an astronomically unlikely outcome- one that for all intents and purposes doesn't change the ex ante the EV at all - radically effects our assessment of PVBPF.

Maybe this is fine - I'm not really claiming there's a technical issue here (although maybe there is; more to think about).

But maybe there's a vibes issue: 10% and 50% sound like really different numbers, and they are! But a 5x difference in PVBPF can correspond to either a 5x difference in actual moral value or the addition of an arbitrarily unlikely 5x-as-good-as-previously-believed-maximum counterfactual.^[4]

1. ^{^}

   Eg on the latest 80k podcast, Will says:

   So the concept of viatopia is that it’s a state of society that is on track to produce a near-best future — something that’s at least 90% as good as a future that we could have.

2. ^{^}

   To get around the fact that I think the current world is net-negative. That's a modeling inconvenience but one that I do think one that neither is nor reveals a fundamental weakness with the idea being gestured at.

3. ^{^}

   You might be able to make this more well-defined via the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

^{^}

I.e. as we make $p={10}^{-1,000,000}$ smaller and smaller, PVBPF doesn't change but the delta between ex ante EVs represented by the original guess of the distribution of probabilities and moral values and the updated guess goes to zero

Show all footnotes

A couple takes from Twitter on the value of merch and signaling that I think are worth sharing here:

1) 

2) 

Is there a good list of the highest leverage things a random US citizen (probably in a blue state) can do to cause Trump to either be removed from office or seriously constrained in some way? Anyone care to brainstorm?

Like the safe state/swing state vote swapping thing during the election was brilliant - what analogues are there for the current moment, if any?

I made a podcast feed for the posts highlighted in Best of: AGI & Animals Debate Week 

RSS Feed to paste into your favorite podcast app: https://f004.backblazeb2.com/file/aaronbergman-public/podcast/agi_animals/feed.xml 

I also like the cover art Gemini made so here it is:

Mostly for fun I vibecoded an API to easily parse EA Forum posts as markdown with full comment details based on post URL (I think helpful mostly for complex/nested comment sections where basic copy and paste doesn't work great)

I have tested it on about three posts and every possible disclaimer applies

• Documentation
• User friendly website version

~30 second ask: Please help @80000_Hours figure out who to partner with by sharing your list of Youtube subscriptions via this survey

Unfortunately this only works well on desktop, so if you're on a phone, consider sending this to yourself for later. Thanks!

@MHR🔸 @Laura Duffy, @AbsurdlyMax and I have been raising money for the EA Animal Welfare Fund on Twitter and Bluesky, and today is the last day to donate!

If we raise $3k more today I will transform my room into an EA paradise complete with OWID charts across the walls, a literal bednet, a shrine, and more (and of course post all this online)! Consider donating if and only if you wouldn't use the money for a better purpose! 

See some more fun discussion and such by following the replies and quote-tweets here: 

Sharing https://earec.net, semantic search for the EA + rationality ecosystem. Not fully up to date, sadly (doesn't have the last month or so of content). The current version is basically a minimal viable product! 

On the results page there is also an option to see EA Forum only results which allow you to sort by a weighted combination of karma and semantic similarity thanks to the API!

Final feature to note is that there's an option to have gpt-4o-mini "manually" read through the summary of each article on the current screen of results, which will give better evaluations of relevance to some query (e.g. "sources I can use for a project on X") than semantic similarity alone.

Still kinda janky - as I said, minimal viable product right now. Enjoy and feedback is welcome!

Thanks to @Nathan Young for commissioning this! 

There's a question on the forum user survey:

How much do you trust other EA Forum users to be genuinely interested in making the world better using EA principles?

This is one thing I've updated down quite a bit over the last year. 

It seems to me that relatively few self-identified EA donors mostly or entirely give to the organization/whatever that they would explicitly endorse as being the single best recipient of a marginal dollar (do others disagree?)

Of course the more important question is whether most EA-inspired dollars are given in such a way (rather than most donors). Unfortunately, I think the answer to this is "no" as well, seeing as OpenPhil continues to donate a majority of dollars to human global health and development^[1] (I threw together a Claude artifact that lets you get a decent picture of how OpenPhil has funded cause areas over time and in aggregate)^[2]

Edit: to clarify, it could be the case that others have object-level disagreements about what the best use of a marginal dollar is. Clearly this is sometimes the case, but it's not what I am getting at here. I am trying to get at the phenomenon where people implicitly say/reason "yes, EA principles imply that the best thing to do would be to donate to X, but I am going to donate to Y instead." I'm guessing this mostly takes the form of people failing to endorse that they're donations are optimally directed rather than that they do a bunch of ground-up reasoning and then decide to ignore the conclusion it gives, though.

1. ^{^}

    See Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare for a sufficient but not necessary case against this.

2. ^{^}

   Data is a few days old and there's a bit of judgement about how to bin various subcategories of grants, but I doubt the general picture would change much if others redid the analysis/binning

Banger from @Linch 

After thinking about this post ("Utilitarians Should Accept that Some Suffering Cannot be “Offset”") some more, there's an additional, weaker claim I want to emphasize, which is: You should be very skeptical that it’s morally good to bring about worlds you wouldn’t personally want to experience all of

We can imagine a society of committed utilitarians all working to bring about a very large universe full of lots of happiness and, in an absolute sense, lots of extreme suffering. The catch is that these very utilitarians are the ones that are going to be experiencing this grand future - not future people or digital people or whomever. 

Personally, they all desperately want to opt out of this - nobody wants to actually go through the extreme suffering regardless of what benefits await, and yet all work day in and day out to bring about this future anyway, condemning themselves to heaven and to hell.

Of course it’s not impossible that their stated morals are right and preferences are morally wrong, but my claim is that we should be very skeptical that the “skin in the game” answer is the wrong one.

And of course here I’m just supposing/assuming that these utilitarians have the preference to avoid this massive future altogether

The point, again, is that you should probably not work to build a future that you yourself would not want to experience just because some abstract arguments say that this is morally good This is a strong hint (not definitive, but strong) that those abstract arguments are wrong.

Re: a recent quick take in which I called on OpenPhil to sue OpenAI: a new document in Musk's lawsuit mentions this explicitly (page 91)

Interesting that the Animal Welfare Fund gives out so few small grants relative to the Infrastructure and Long Term Future funds (Global Health and Development has only given out 20 grants, all very large, so seems to be a more fundamentally different type of thing(?)). Data here.

A few stats:

• The 25th percentile AWF grant was $24,250, compared to $5,802 for Infrastructure and $7,700 for LTFF (and median looks basically the same).
• AWF has only made just nine grants of less than $10k, compared to 163 (Infrastructure) and 132 (LTFF).

Proportions under $threshold 

Grants under $threshold 

Summary stats (rounded)

I made a custom GPT that is just normal, fully functional ChatGPT-4, but I will donate any revenue this generates^[1] to effective charities. 

Presenting: Donation Printer 

1. ^{^}

   OpenAI is rolling out monetization for custom GPTs:

   Builders can earn based on GPT usage

   In Q1 we will launch a GPT builder revenue program. As a first step, US builders will be paid based on user engagement with their GPTs. We'll provide details on the criteria for payments as we get closer.

Wanted to bring this comment thread out to ask if there's a good list of AI safety papers/blog posts/urls anywhere for this?

(I think local digital storage in many locations probably makes more sense than paper but also why not both)

Was sent a resource in response to this quick take on effectively opposing Trump that at a glance seems promising enough to share on its own: 

From A short to-do list by the Substack Make Trump Lose Again:

1. Friends in CA, AZ, or NM: Ask your governor to activate the national guard (...)
2. Friends in NC: Check to see if your vote in the NC Supreme Court race is being challenged (...)
3. Friends everywhere: Call your senators and tell them to vote no on HR 22 (...)
4. Friends everywhere: If you’d like to receive personalized guidance on what opportunities are best suited to your skills or geographic area, we are excited to announce that our personalized recommendation form has been reopened! Fill it in here!

Bolding is mine to highlight the 80k-like opportunity. I'm abusing the block quote a bit by taking out most of the text, so check out the actual post if interested! 

There's also a volunteering opportunities page advertising "A short list of high-impact election opportunities, continuously updated" which links to a notion page that's currently down.

I'm pretty happy with how this "Where should I donate, under my values?" Manifold market has been turning out. Of course all the usual caveats pertaining to basically-fake "prediction" markets apply, but given the selection effects of who spends manna on an esoteric market like this I put a non-trivial weight into the (live) outcomes.

I guess I'd encourage people with a bit more money to donate to do something similar (or I guess defer, if you think I'm right about ethics!), if just as one addition to your portfolio of donation-informing considerations.

According to Kevin Esvelt on the recent 80,000k podcast (excellent btw, mostly on biosecurity), eliminating the New World New World screwworm could be an important farmed animal welfare (infects livestock), global health (infects humans), development (hurts economies), science/innovation intervention, and most notably quasi-longtermist wild animal suffering intervention. 

More, if you think there’s a non-trivial chance of human disempowerment, societal collapse, or human extinction in the next 10 years, this would be important to do ASAP because we may not be able to later.

From the episode:

Kevin Esvelt: 

...

But from an animal wellbeing perspective, in addition to the human development, the typical lifetime of an insect species is several million years. So 10⁶ years times 10⁹ hosts per year means an expected 10¹⁵ mammals and birds devoured alive by flesh-eating maggots. For comparison, if we continue factory farming for another 100 years, that would be 10¹³ broiler hens and pigs. So unless it’s 100 times worse to be a factory-farmed broiler hen than it is to be devoured alive by flesh-eating maggots, then when you integrate over the future, it is more important for animal wellbeing that we eradicate the New World screwworm from the wild than it is that we end factory farming tomorrow.

Dropping a longer quote with more context in this footnote.^[1] A quick Google Images search makes this all the more visceral, but be warned that it's kinda graphic.

I would really love to see someone (maybe me) do a deeper dive into this and write up a proper Forum post. 
 

1. ^{^}

   Kevin Esvelt: So the fourth one might actually be the easiest to get going: the New World screwworm, which has the amazing scientific name of Cochliomyia hominivorax: “the man devourer.” But it doesn’t primarily eat humans; it feeds indiscriminately on warm-blooded things, so mammals and birds. It’s a botfly that lays its eggs in open wounds, anything as small as a tick bite. And it’s called the screwworm because the larvae are screw-shaped and they drill their way into living flesh, devouring it. And as they do, they cultivate bacteria that attract new gravid females that lay more eggs and continue the cycle.

   So you have this macabre dance of parasitisation that results in the animal being devoured alive by flesh-eating maggots. And we know that it’s horrendously painful, because people get affected by this, and the standard of treatment is you give them morphine immediately so that surgeons can cut the things out — because it’s just that painful; it’s unbelievably agonising. And by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, there’s about a billion hosts of this every year — so a billion animals are devoured alive by flesh-eating maggots every single year.

   We even know that we can eradicate this species from at least many ecosystems and not see any effects, because it used to be present in North America too, and we wiped it out using nuclear technology, oddly enough. Some clever folks noticed if you irradiate the larvae, then they grow up sterile. And if you release enough of them, then the wild ones will mate with a sterile one, and they only mate once, so you can suppress the population to the point of not being there anymore.

   So we did this first up through Florida and then across the West, and then down through Texas to the Mexican border. The US Department of Agriculture then inked a deal with the Mexican government to eradicate them from Mexico because the southern border was shorter and therefore cheaper. And then they just went country by country down Central America to Panama. The southern border of Panama is the shortest, so American taxpayer dollars today contribute to the creation and maintenance of a living wall of sterile screwworm flies released in southern Panama that prevents the South American screwworm from reinvading North America — 10 million released every week.

   Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.

   Kevin Esvelt: But there’s too many of them in South America to wipe out by that means. And so the way forward is obviously gene drive. If the Mercosur countries agree that they want to get rid of the New World screwworm, they can start with something like a daisy drive locally — and Uruguay is working on this — then they can wipe it out from their country. Uruguay loses about 0.1% of their total country’s GDP to the screwworm because they’re so dependent on animal exports. I mean, Uruguay and beef is… To those listeners who eat beef, I’m going to start fights here, but it’s better than beef from Argentina, even. But anyway, they’re all very concerned about their beef, and screwworm is horrific.

   It also, of course, preferentially hurts poor farmers who struggle to afford the veterinary treatments for their animals. And of course, they hate to see it, because here you’re watching these animals that you’re caring for literally get devoured by flesh-eating maggots, and it’s agonisingly painful.

   But from an animal wellbeing perspective, in addition to the human development, the typical lifetime of an insect species is several million years. So 10⁶ years times 10⁹ hosts per year means an expected 10¹⁵ mammals and birds devoured alive by flesh-eating maggots. For comparison, if we continue factory farming for another 100 years, that would be 10¹³ broiler hens and pigs. So unless it’s 100 times worse to be a factory-farmed broiler hen than it is to be devoured alive by flesh-eating maggots, then when you integrate over the future, it is more important for animal wellbeing that we eradicate the New World screwworm from the wild than it is that we end factory farming tomorrow.

Random sorta gimmicky AI safety community building idea: tabling at universities but with a couple laptop signed into Claude Pro with different accounts. Encourage students (and profs) to try giving it some hard question from eg a problem set and see how it performs. Ideally have a big monitor for onlookers to easily see.

Most college students are probably still using ChatGPT-3.5, if they use LLMs at all. There’s a big delta now between that and the frontier.

I went ahead and made an "Evergreen" tag as proposed in my quick take from a while back: 

Meant to highlight that a relatively old post (perhaps 1 year or older?) still provides object level value to read i.e., above and beyond:

1. It's value as a cultural or historical artifact above
2. The value of more recent work it influenced or inspired

Offer subject to be arbitrarily stopping at some point (not sure exactly how many I'm willing to do)

Give me chatGPT Deep Research queries and I'll run them. My asks are that:

1. You write out exactly what you want the prompt to be so I can just copy and paste something in
2. Feel free to request a specific model (I think the options are o1, o1-pro, o3-mini, and o3-mini-high) but be ok with me downgrading to o3-mini
3. Be cool with me very hastily answering the inevitable set of follow-up questions that always get asked (seems unavoidable for whatever reason). I might say something like "all details are specified above; please use your best judgement"

A few Forum meta things you might find useful or interesting:

1.  Two super basic interactive data viz apps 
   1. 1) How often (in absolute and relative terms) a given forum topic appears with another given topic
   2. 2) Visualizing the popularity of various tags
2. An updated Forum scrape including the full text and attributes of 10k-ish posts as of Christmas, '22
   1. See the data without full text in Google Sheets here
   2. Post explaining version 1.0 from a few months back
3. From the data in no. 2, a few effortposts that never garnered an accordant amount of attention (qualitatively filtered from posts with (1) long read times (2) modest positive karma (3) not a ton of comments.
   1.  Columns labels should be (left to right):
      1. Title/link
      2. Author(s)
      3. Date posted
      4. Karma (as of a week ago)
      5. Comments (as of a week ago)

This post is half object level, half experiment with “semicoherent audio monologue ramble → prose” AI (presumably GPT-3.5/4 based) program audiopen.ai. 

In the interest of the latter objective, I’m including 3 mostly-redundant subsections: 

1. A ’final’ mostly-AI written text, edited and slightly expanded just enough so that I endorse it in full (though recognize it’s not amazing or close to optimal) 
2. The raw AI output
3. The raw transcript

1) Dubious asymmetry argument in WWOTF

In Chapter 9 of his book, What We Are the Future, Will MacAskill argues that the future holds positive moral value under a total utilitarian perspective. He posits that people generally use resources to achieve what they want - either for themselves or for others - and thus good outcomes are easily explained as the natural consequence of agents deploying resources for their goals. Conversely, bad outcomes tend to be side effects of pursuing other goals. While malevolence and sociopathy do exist, they are empirically rare.

MacAskill argues that in a future with continued economic growth and no existential risk, we will likely direct more resources towards doing good things due to self-interest and increased impartial altruism. He contrasts this eutopian scenario with an anti-eutopia: the worst possible world, which he argues (compellingly, I think) less probable because it requires convoluted explanations as opposed to simple desires like enjoying ice cream. He concludes that the probability of achieving a eutopia outweighs the low likelihood but extreme negative consequences of an anti-eutopia. 

However, I believe McCaskill's analysis neglects an important aspect: considering not only these two extremes but also the middle distribution where neither significant amounts of resources nor agentic intervention occur. 

When physics operates without agency-driven resource allocation, we have good reason to expect evolution to create conscious beings whose suffering we can attribute to the ease with which animals (or animal-like beings) can lose all future expected genetic reproduction - as MacAskill himself argues elsewhere in the book.

Importantly, though, this non-agentic suffering, seems more likely to complement agentic resource deployment - not substitute for it as one might intuit. That’s because human or post-human expansion necessarily entails the expansion of concentrated physical energy, and seems likely to entail the expansion of other scarce, pro-biotic resources such as DNA, water, and computation.

Although McCaskill does not explicitly claim his binary model comparing eutopia and anti-eutopia is sufficient for understanding this complex problem, it seems to me to be implied; 

Only upon attempting to draft a blog post revisiting his work did I noticed the line “We can make some progress by focusing on just two extreme scenarios: the best or worst possible futures, eutopia and anti-eutopia,” acknowledging status of this model as a bit of evidence in the larger question of the future’s value.

In sum, I think MacAskill's analysis would benefit from addressing the morally relevant middle distribution to provide a more accurate representation of the future under total utilitarianism.
 

2) Utilitarian Utopia, Anti-Utopia and the Neglected Middle 

In Chapter 9 of his book, What We Are the Future, Will McCaskill argues that the future holds positive moral value under a total utilitarian perspective. He posits that people generally use resources to achieve what they want - either for themselves or others - and thus good outcomes are often intentional. Conversely, bad outcomes tend to be side effects of pursuing other goals. While malevolence and sociopathy do exist, they are empirically rare.

McCaskill then extrapolates this argument to suggest that in a future with continued economic growth (assuming no existential risk), we will likely direct more resources towards doing good things due to self-interest and increased impartial altruism. He contrasts this utopian scenario with an anti-utopia: the worst possible world which is less probable because it requires convoluted explanations as opposed to simple desires like enjoying ice cream.

He concludes that the probability of achieving a utopia outweighs the low likelihood but extreme negative consequences of an anti-utopia. However, I believe McCaskill's analysis neglects an important aspect: considering not only these two extremes but also the middle distribution where neither significant amounts of resources nor agentic intervention occur.

In such cases where physics operates without agency-driven resource allocation, evolution can create conscious beings like plants and animals who experience suffering without any intentionality behind it. This middle distribution may actually skew negatively since evolution favors reproductive fitness at any cost; as a result, sentient beings could suffer more than they experience happiness during their lives.

I argue that wild animal welfare is net negative overall; if given a choice between having them continue living or ceasing their existence altogether, I would choose nonexistence on moral grounds. Although McCaskill does not explicitly claim his heuristic comparison between utopia and anti-utopia is sufficient for understanding this complex problem, he strongly implies it throughout most of his chapter.

Upon revisiting his work while drafting my response blog post, I noticed a single line acknowledging the limitations of his approach. However, this caveat does not adequately emphasize that his argument should be considered only as a first pass and not definitive proof. In my opinion, McCaskill's analysis would benefit from addressing the morally relevant middle distribution to provide a more accurate representation of the future under total utilitarianism.

-------

3) Original Transcript

Okay, so I'm going to describe where I think I disagree with Will McCaskill in Chapter 9 of his book, What We Are the Future, where he basically makes an argument that the future is positive in expectation, positive moral value under a total utilitarian perspective. And so his argument is basically that people, it's very easy to see that people deploy the resources in order to get what they want, which is either to help themselves and sometimes to help other people, whether it's just their family or more impartial altruism. Basically you can always explain why somebody does something good just because it's good and they want it, which is kind of, I think that's correct and compelling. Whereas when something bad happens, it's generally the side effect of something else. At least, yeah. So while there is malevolence and true sociopathy, those things are in fact empirically quite rare, but if you undergo a painful procedure, like a medical procedure, it's because there's something affirmative that you want and that's a necessary side effect. It's not because you actually sought that out in particular. And all this I find true and correct and compelling. And so then he uses this to basically say that in the future, presumably conditional on continued economic growth, which basically just means no existential risk and humans being around, we'll be employing a lot of resources in the direction of doing things well or doing good. Largely just because people just want good things for themselves and hopefully to some extent because there will be more impartial altruists willing to both trade and to put their own resources in order to help others. And once again, all true, correct, compelling in my opinion. So on the other side, so basically utopia in this sense, utopia basically meaning employing a lot of, the vast majority of resources in the direction of doing good is very likely and very good. On the other side, it's how likely and how bad is what he calls anti-utopia, which is basically the worst possible world. And he basically using... I don't need to get into the particulars, but basically I think he presents a compelling argument that in fact it would be worse than the best world is good, at least to the best of our knowledge right now. But it's very unlikely because it's hard to see how that comes about. You actually can invent stories, but they get kind of convoluted. And it's not nearly as simple as, okay, people like ice cream and so they buy ice cream. It's like, you have to explain why so many resources are being deployed in the direction of doing good things and you still end up with a terrible world. Then he basically says, okay, all things considered, the probability of good utopia wins out relative to the badness, but very low probability of anti-utopia. Again, a world full of misery. And where I think he goes wrong is that he neglects the middle of the distribution where the distribution is ranging from... I don't know how to formalize this, but something like percentage or amount of... Yeah, one of those two, percentage or amount of resources being deployed in the direction of on one side of the spectrum causing misery and then the other side of the spectrum causing good things to come about. And so he basically considers the two extreme cases. But I claim that, in fact, the middle of the distribution is super important. And actually when you include that, things look significantly worse because the middle of the distribution is basically like, what does the world look like when you don't have agents essentially deploying resources in the direction of anything? You just have the universe doing its thing. We can set aside the metaphysics or physics technicalities of where that becomes problematic. Anyway, so basically the middle of the distribution is just universe doing its thing, physics operating. I think there's the one phenomenon that results from this that we know of to be morally important or we have good reason to believe is morally important is basically evolution creating conscious beings that are not agentic in the sense that I care about now, but basically like plants and animals. And presumably I think you have good reason to believe animals are sentient. And evolution, I claim, creates a lot of suffering. And so you look at the middle of the distribution and it's not merely asymmetrical, but it's asymmetrical in the opposite direction. So I claim that if you don't have anything, if you don't have lots of resources being deployed in any direction, this is a bad world because you can expect evolution to create a lot of suffering. The reason for that is, as he gets into, something like either suffering is intrinsically more important, which I put some weight on that. It's not exactly clear how to distinguish that from the empirical case. And the empirical case is basically it's very easy to lose all your reproductive fitness in the evolutionary world very quickly. It's relatively hard to massively gain a ton. Reproduction is like, even having sex, for example, only increases your relative reproductive success a little bit, whereas you can be killed in an instant. And so this creates an asymmetry where if you buy a functional view of qualia, then it results in there being an asymmetry where animals are just probably going to experience more pain over their lives, by and large, than happiness. And I think this is definitely true. I think wild animal welfare is just net negative. I wish if I could just... If these are the only two options, have there not be any wild animals or have them continue living as they are, I think it would be overwhelmingly morally important to not have them exist anymore. And so tying things back. Yeah, so McCaskill doesn't actually... I don't think he makes a formally incorrect statement. He just strongly implies that this case, that his heuristic of comparing the two tails is a pretty good proxy for the best we can do. And that's where I disagree. I think there's actually one line in the chapter where he basically says, we can get a grip on this very hard problem by doing the following. But I only noticed that when I went back to start writing a blog post. And the vast majority of the chapter is basically just the object level argument or evidence presentation. There's no repetition emphasizing that this is a really, I guess, sketchy, for lack of a better word, dubious case. Or first pass, I guess, is a better way of putting it. This is just a first pass, don't put too much weight on this. That's not how it comes across, at least in my opinion, to the typical reader. And yeah, I think that's everything.

So the EA Forum has, like, an ancestor? Is this common knowledge? Lol

Felicifia: not functional anymore but still available to view. Learned about thanks to a Tweet  from Jacy

From Felicifia Is No Longer Accepting New Users:

Update: threw together

• some data with authors, post title names, date, and number of replies (and messed one section up so some rows are missing links)
• A rather long PDF with the posts and replies together (for quick keyword searching), with decent but not great formatting 

Made a podcast feed with EAG talks. Now has both the recent Bay Area and London ones:

• Spotify 
• RSS (can plug into any other platform)

Full vids on the CEA Youtube page

A (potential) issue with MacAskill's presentation of moral uncertainty

Not able to write a real post about this atm, though I think it deserves one. 

MacAskill makes a similar point in WWOTF, but IMO the best and most decision-relevant quote comes from his second appearance on the 80k podcast:

There are possible views in which you should give more weight to suffering...I think we should take that into account too, but then what happens? You end up with kind of a mix between the two, supposing you were 50/50 between classical utilitarian view and just strict negative utilitarian view. Then I think on the natural way of making the comparison between the two views, you give suffering twice as much weight as you otherwise would. 

I don't think the second bolded sentence follows in any objective or natural manner from the first. Rather, this reasoning takes a distinctly total utilitarian meta-level perspective, summing the various signs of utility and then implicitly considering them under total utilitarianism. 

Even granting that the mora arithmetic is appropriate and correct, it's not at all clear what to do once the 2:1 accounting is complete. MacAskill's suffering-focused twin might have reasoned instead that 

Negative and total utilitarianism are both 50% likely to be true, so we must give twice the normal amount of weight to happiness. However, since any sufficiently severe suffering morally outweighs any amount of happiness, the moral outlook on a world with twice as much wellbeing is the same as before

A better proxy for genuine neutrality (and the best one I can think of) might be to simulate bargaining over real-world outcomes from each perspective, which would probably result in at least some proportion of one's resources being deployed as though negative utilitarianism were true (perhaps exactly 50%, though I haven't given this enough thought to make the claim outright).

The recent 80k podcast on the contingency of abolition got me wondering what, if anything, the fact of slavery's abolition says about the ex ante probability of abolition - or more generally, what one observation of a binary random variable $X$ says about $p$ as in

Turns out there is an answer (!), and it's found starting in paragraph 3 of subsection 1 of section 3 of the Binomial distribution Wikipedia page:

A closed form Bayes estimator for p also exists when using the Beta distribution as a conjugate prior distribution. When using a general $\text{Beta}(\alpha ,\beta )$ ⁡ as a prior, the posterior mean estimator is...

 ${\hat{p}}_b=\frac{x+\alpha }{n+\alpha +\beta }$

[...]

For the special case of using the standard uniform distribution as a non-informative prior,  $\text{Beta}(\alpha ,\beta )=U(0,1)$ , the posterior mean estimator becomes:  ${\hat{p}}_b=\frac{x+1}{n+2}$

Don't worry, I had no idea what $\text{Beta}(\alpha ,\beta )$ was until 20 minutes ago. In the Shortform spirit, I'm gonna skip any actual explanation and just link Wikipedia and paste this image (I added the uniform distribution dotted line because why would they leave that out?)

So...

Cool, so for the $n=1$ case, we get that if you have a prior over the ex ante probability space$[0,1]$ described by one of those curves in the image, you...

• 0) Start from 'zero empirical information guesstimate' $\text{E}\left[\text{Beta}\right(\alpha ,\beta \left)\right]=\frac{\alpha }{\alpha +\beta }$ 
• 1a) observe that the thing happens $(x=1)$, moving you, Ideal Bayesian Agent, to updated probability  ${\hat{p}}_b=\frac{1+\alpha }{1+\alpha +\beta }>\frac{\alpha }{\alpha +\beta }$ OR
• 1b) observe that the thing doesn't happen $(x=0)$, moving you to updated probability ${\hat{p}}_b=\frac{\alpha }{1+\alpha +\beta }<\frac{\alpha }{\alpha +\beta }$

In the uniform case (which actually seems kind of reasonable for abolition), you...

• 0) Start from prior $E\left[p\right]=1/2$
• 1a) observe that the thing happens, moving you to updated probability   ${\hat{p}}_b=2/3$ 
• 1a) observe that the thing doesn't happen, moving you to updated probability   ${\hat{p}}_b=\frac{1}{3}$