This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
Hello! I'm Justin Portela. I got hired by GWWC to make YouTube videos after AI in Context did such a kickass job.
My channel is using that same cinematic, high-production value beauty to talk about everything in the EA universe that isn't AI.
...
I'm grateful you shared this since it's probably interesting to the community, but flagging I'm a little nervous about the EA Forum filling up with cross-posts from X. I think that would make it less interesting and unique.
I share your concern.
The main reason I share some Twitter links is that I think they're relevant (this seems to be confirmed by the positive votes).
Deciding which big lab to join is a very important decision that many EAs are making.
(Personally, I often find myself going to Twitter because there are very relevant news updates regarding AI safety that aren't shared in the forum)
I agree that upvotes are an update that the content was useful and that might mean I'm just off here.
I guess I think relevancy or interest isn't the only thing we should be tracking; I think the forum adds value because, unlike Twitter, the posts and replies here are usually more thoughtful and more carefully investigated. To put it another way, if I just wanted relevant news and updates, I'd go to Twitter. Here, I'd hope for more commentary (e.g. "Jan has joined Anthropic. Here are some thoughts I have about this and how they might be relevant for EAs deciding which lab to join").
I'm not saying you personally should have done this and, again, I am grateful you made the effort to share this.
Totally agree!
I would love to read a thoughtful analysis (I'm not qualified to do it).
My main question is: "Should EAs still try to join OpenAI?" (80,000 Hours is still recommending it)
I think, at this point, EAs (including 80k Hours) publicly boycotting OpenAI, and refusing to work there, and explaining why, clearly and forcefully, would do a lot more good than trying to work there and nudge them from the inside towards not imposing X risks on humanity.
Maybe there should be a separate space for "relevant EA news"? So that EAs don't have to ~waste time on Twitter to be up to date.
Personally, I wish it existed.
A potential solution would be for the forum to have a tag called something like "News" and then with the "Customize feed" feature let people choose between hide/reduce/default.
Appreciate the suggestion! Just wanted to mention that this already exists - users can add the "News relevant to effective altruism" topic to posts, and they can change how posts in this topic are weighted in their frontpage list.
Oh, sorry! I literally searched for "News" but didn't see it 🤦🤦
Thanks!
Great minds! :)
You might like David Nash's Monthly Overload of Effective Altruism.
It has a combination of forum/EA org updates and relevant news.
I can also recommend Shakeel's Transformer newsletter for AI-specific news.