Hello all,

long time lurker here. I was doing a bunch of reading today about polygenic screening, and one of the papers was so good that I had to share it, in case anyone interested in animal welfare was unfamiliar with it. The post is awaiting moderation but will presumably be here in due time.

So while I am making my first post I might as well introduce myself.

I have been sort of vaguely EA aligned since I discovered the movement 5ish years ago, listened to every episode of the 80k podcast and read a tonne of related books and blog posts.

I have a background in biophysics, though I am currently working as a software engineer in a scrappy startup to improve my programming skills. I have vague plans to return to research and do a phd at some point but lets see.

EA things I am interested in:

• bio bio bio (everything from biorisk and pandemics to the existential risk posed by radical transhumanism)
• ai (that one came out of nowhere! I mean I used to like reading Yudkowskys stuff thinking it was scifi but here we are. AGI timelines shrinking like spinach in frying pan, hoo-boy)
• global development (have lived, worked and travelled extensively in third world countries. lots of human capital out there being wasted)
• animal welfare! or I was until I gave up on the topic in despair (see my essay above) though I am still a vegan-aligned vegetarian
• philosophy?
• economics?
• i mean its all good stuff basically

Recently I have also been reading some interesting criticisms of EA that have expanded my horizons a little, the ones I enjoyed the most were

• The Nietzschean Challenge to Effective Altruism (Effective Aesthetics (EÆ) sounds awesome)
• Against Effective Altruism (the guy is just a damn fine writer and thinker, though he doesn't seem to propose any alternative which I find annoying)
• Effective Accelerationism (this appeals to my physics background and the parsimony of panpsychism and other such things)

But at the end of the day I think EAs own personal brand of minimally deontic utilitarianism is simple and useful enough for most circumstances. Maybe a little bit of Nietzschean spice when I am feeling in the mood.. and frankly I think fundamentally e/acc is mostly quite compatible, aside from the details of the coming AI apocalypse and [how|whether] to deal with it.

I also felt a little bit like coming out of the woodwork recently after all the twitter drama and cancellation shitstorms. Just to say that I think you folks are doing a fine thing actually, and hopefully the assassins will move on to the next campaign before too long.

Best regards! I will perhaps be slightly more engaged henceforth.

Hi all, I'm Vlad, 35, from Romania. I've been working in software engineering for 12 years. I have a bachelor's and master's degree in Physics.

I'm here because I read "What we owe the future", after it was recommended to me by a friend.

I got the book recommended to me because I had an idea which is a little unconfortable for some people, but I think this idea is extremely important, and this friend of mine instantly classified my thoughts as "a branch of long-termism". I also think my idea is extremely relevant to this group, and I'm interested in getting feedback about it.

Context for the  idea: Long-termism is concerned about people as far into the future as possible, up to the end of the universe.

The idea: ...what if we can make it so there doesn't have to be an end? If we had a limitless source of energy, there wouldn't have to be an end. Not only that, but we could make a lot of people very happy (like billions of billions of billions .....of billions of them? a literal infinity of them even)

It sounds crazy, I realize, but my best knowledge on this topic says this:

• We know that we don't know all the laws of the universe
• Even the known laws kind of have a loop-hole in them. Energy is supposed to be conserved, but we don't necessarily know how much energy exists out there - if an infinite amount exists, we can both use it, and conserve it
• I received feedback from a few physicists already, none of them said that infinite energy is clearly impossible - just that we don't know how we could get it

So my conclusion is: some amount of effort into the topic of infinite energy should be invested. 

Is anyone interested in talking about this? I can show you what I have so far.

P.S. fusion is not a source of infinite energy, but merely a source of energy potentially far better than most others we know

P.P.S. I created this website for the initiative: https://github.com/vladiibine/infinite-energy

Just a warning on treating everyone as if they argue in good faith. They don’t. Émile P. Torres, aka @xriskology on Twitter doesn’t. He may say true honest things but if you find anything he says insightful check all the sources.

Émile P. Torres’s history of dishonesty and harassment An incomplete summary https://markfuentes1.substack.com/p/emile-p-torress-history-of-dishonesty

Hey everyone, I'm curious about the extent to which people in EA take (weak/strong) antinatalism/ negative utilitarianism seriously. I've read a bit around the topic and find some arguments more persuasive than others, but the idea that many lives are net-negative, and that even good lives might be worse than we think they are, has stuck with me. 

Based on my own mood diary, I'm leaning towards something around a 5.5/10 on a happiness scale being the neutral point, under which a life isn't worth living. 

This has made me a lot less enthusiastic about 'saving lives' for its own sake, especially those lives in countries/ regions with very poor quality of life. So I suspect that some 'life-saving' charities could be actively harmful and that we should focus way more on 'life-improving' charities/ cause areas. (There are probably very few charities that only save lives- preventing malaria/ reducing lead exposure both improves and saves lives- but we can imagine a 'pure-play life-saving charity'.)

I haven't come to any conclusions here, but the 'cost to save a life' framing, still common in EA, strikes me as probably morally invalid. I don't hear this argument mentioned much (you don't seem to get anyone actively arguing against 'saving lives'), so I'm just curious what the range of EA opinion is. 

I feel confused about how dangerous/costly it is to use LLMs for private documents or thoughts to assist longtermist research, in a way that may wind up in the training data for future iterations of LLMs. Some sample use cases that I'd be worried about:

• Summarizing private AI evals docs about plans to evaluate future models
• Rewrite emails on high-stakes AI gov conversations
• Generate lists of ideas for biosecurity interventions that can be helped/harmed by AI
• Scrub potentially risky/infohazard-y information from a planned public forecasting questions
• Summarize/rewrite speculations of potential near-future AI capabilities gains.

I'm worried about using LLMs for the following reasons:

1. Standard privacy concerns/leakage to dangerous (human) actors
   1. If it's possible to back out your biosecurity plans from the models, this might give ideas to terrorists/rogue gov'ts.
   2. your infohazards might leak
   3. People might (probabilistically) back out private sensitive communication, which could be embarrassing
      1. I wouldn't be surprised if care for consumer privacy at AGI labs for chatbot consumers is much lower than say for emails hosted by large tech companies
         1. I've heard rumors to this effect, also see
   4. (unlikely) your capabilities insights might actually be useful for near-future AI developers.
2. Training models in an undesirable direction:
   1. Give pre-superintelligent AIs more-realistic-than-usual ideas/plans for takeover
   2. Subtly bias the motivations of future AIs in dangerous ways.
   3. Perhaps leak capabilities gains ideas that allows for greater potential for self-improvement.

I'm confused whether these are actually significant concerns, vs pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Advice/guidance/more considerations highly appreciated! 

I would like advice on writing a resume and applying to work in an effective career.  I will graduate with an economics bachelor's degree in April. I'm taking many statistics courses. I also took calculus and computer science courses. I live on the west coast of Canada and I am willing to move.

I believe I would be well suited to AI Governance but it may be better currently to find statistics/econometrics work or do survey design (to build general skills until I know more AI Governance people, or switch into a different effective cause area)

I am also open to recommendations for other effective careers. My degree is quite general and I have deliberately avoiding sinking much into AI Governance specifically. I think I have a comparative advantage in AI Governance because my father is a manager of a machine learning research team at Google, that I could potentially influence.

If I don't find an occupation immediately after graduation then I will do local community-building in Cryonics/Life-Extension and take these courses online:

• Bayesian Statistics (Statistical Rethinking by Richard Mcelreath
• AI Governance by BlueDot Impact
•  In-Depth EA program

I would like to do these courses anyway but if I find an occupation then I can do one or two at a time. 

If I find an occupation outside EA then I will focus on learning statistics and other general skills. Then I can better apply these skills once I move into an AI Governance. If the occupation is in government or policy spaces then I will develop relevant social networks. The downside is that I'd be less poised to take opportunities in AI Governance.

I don't know much about finding an occupation in AI Governance. I applied to internships last summer and after being refused I asked the hiring staff what skills I should learn, and read all their recommendations. But I just don't really know what is going on in the AI Governance career path.

I'd appreciate a comment if you know of:

• guides to writing resumes and job applications (EA-specific)
• places I should apply to that aren't on the 80000 hours job board.
• advice on what non-EA work would help me build relevant skills and networks. (or even volunteer projects I could do on my own! I'm not in immediate need of paid work)

I have seen Sabine Hossenfelder claim that it will be very expensive to maintain superintelligent AIs. I also hear many people claiming that digital minds will use much less energy than human minds, so they will be much more numerous. Does anyone have some information or a guess on how much energy ChatGPT spends per hour per user?

Hi I’m Silas Barta. First comment here! I organize the Austin LessWrong group. I’m currently retired off of earlier investing (formerly software engineer) but am still looking for my next career to maximize my impact. I think I have a calling in either information security (esp reverse engineering) or improving the quality of explanations and introductions to technical topics.

I have donated cryptocurrency and contributed during Facebook’s Giving Tuesday, and gone to the Bay Area EA Globals in 2016 and 2017.

I'm looking for statistics on how doable it is to solve all the problems we care about. For example, I came across this: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Goal-1.pdf from the UN which says extreme poverty could be sorted out in 20 years for $175 billion a year. That is actually very doable, in light of the fact of how much money can go into war (in 1945, the US spent 40% of its GDP into the war). I'm looking for more numbers like that, e.g. how much money it takes to solve X problem. 

I intend to use them for a post on how there is no particular reason we can't declare total war on suffering. We can totally organize massively to do great things, and we have done it many times before. We should have a wartime mobilization for the goal of ending suffering.

I thought it might be helpful to share this article. The title speaks for itself.

How to Legalize Prediction Markets

What you (yes, you) can do to move humanity forward

Does anyone know why Singer hasn't changed his views on infanticide and killing animals after he had become a hedonist utilitarian? As far as I know, his former views were based on the following:

a. Creation and fulfilment of new preferences is morally neutral.

b. Thwarting existing preferences is morally bad.

c. Persons have preferences about their future.

d. Non-persons don't have a sense of the future, they don't have preferences about their future either. They live in the moment.

e. Killing persons thwarts their preferences about the future.

f. Killing non-persons doesn't thwart such preferences.

g. Therefore killing a person can't be compensated by creating a new person. Whereas when you kill a non-person, you don't thwart many preferences anyway so killing non-persons can be compensated.

I think after he had become a hedonist this person/non-person asymmetry should mostly disappear. But I haven't seen him updating Animal Liberation or other books. Why is that?

Hello everyone!  My name is Carlos. I recently realized I should be leading a life of service, instead of one where I only care about myself, and that has taken me here, to the place that is all about doing the most good.

I'm an odd guy, in that I have read some LessWrong and have been reading Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten for years, but am for all intents and purposes a mystic. That shouldn't put me at odds here too much, since rationality is definitely a powerful and much needed tool in certain contexts (such as this one), it's just that it cannot do all things.

I wonder if there are others like me here, since after all, the decision to give to charity, particularly to far-off places, is not exactly rational.

Hoping to learn a lot, and to figure out a way to make my career (been a software developer for 11 years) high impact, or at least, actually helpful.

You guys are the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars, and I am ready to be an X-Wing pilot in it!

Qn: Where is the closest EA community base to the US? How accesible is the USA from it (US Consulate)?

Context: I am recently let go from my job while on a visa in the states. Which means I have to leave the US within the next 7 days. I would like to live somewhere close to the US where I can find community so that I don't loose momentum to do the intense work that job search needs. I tend to be really affected by the energy of where I am; I work best in cities, I tend to sleep most on a countryside.

This might also be a good resource for people who are not able to enter the US for any reason whatsoever. I am assuming a longterm housing community in a nomad friendly place like CDMX would do wonders for people wishing to be within +/- 3 hours of timezone of their American colleagues.

Hi all,

Moya here from Darmstadt, Germany. I am a Culture-associated scientist, trans* feminist, poly, kinky, and a witch.
I got into LessWrong in 2016 and then EA 2016 or 2017, don't quite remember. :)

I went to the University of Iceland, did a Master's degree in Computer Science / Bioinformatics there, then built software for the European Space Agency, and nowadays am a freelance programmer and activist in the Seebrücke movement in Germany and other activist groups as well. I also help organize local burn events (some but not all of them being FLINTA* exclusive safer spaces.)

Silly little confession: It took me so many years to finally sign up to the EA forum because my password manager is not great and I just didn't want to bother opening it and storing yet another password in there. But hey, finally overcame that incredibly-tiny-in-hindsight-obstacle after just a bit over half a decade and signed up. \o/

First time poster here.
I am currently doing my master's degree in design engineering at Imperial College London, and I am trying to create a project proposal around the topic of computational social choice and machine learning for ethical decision making. I'm struggling to find a "design engineering" take on this - what can I do to contribute in the field as a design engineer?

In terms of prior art, I've been inspired by MIT's Moral Machine, feeding ML models of aggregate ethical decisions from people. If anyone has any ideas on a des eng angle to approach this topic, please give me some pointers! 

TIA

Hi everyone,

I was close to becoming a statistic of someone who started reading 80,000 hours but never completed the career planning program. I am coming back now as I need some direction.

Of all the global priorities, I gravitate toward those that focus on improving physical and mental health. As someone who deals with chronic pain and is in between jobs, nothing consumes my attention more than alleviating physical and mental suffering.

I am curious if anyone in the community spends their work life thinking and working on increasing longevity, eliminating chronic pain, improving athletic performance, or improving individual reasoning or cognition.

As I am searching for jobs that align with my interests and considering going back to school, I would be grateful for any insight that the community has to offer with regard to pursuing these different fields.

I am 32 years old and unfortunately, 10 years of medical school is no longer appealing. I've thought about biotech and IT because of the limitless upside that tech generally can leverage in terms of health outcomes and even salary, but I'm overwhelmed about the best place to begin to get into those fields.

I'm also thinking about PA school, but I feel like that might place limits on making a larger impact given the connotations (implicit and otherwise) of being an "assistant".

Thank you for reading this far and for any advice you are willing to share!

Chase

Woof. This look’s exhausting. So I found out I’m on the autism spectrum. My energy for people saying things is… not a very high capacity. It’s been fun recently to stretch my curiosity with this AI https://chat.openai.com/chat But engaging with people is generally an overwhelming prospect.

I want to design a stupidly efficient system that revives public journalism and research, strengthens eco-conscious businesses challenged by competitors who manufacture unsustainable consumer goods, provides supplemental education for age groups to support navigating changing understanding and provide guidance for “better humaning and/or Earth/environmental custodianship”, and establish foundations for universal basic income. And probably design a functional healthcare system while I’m at it. And I want to burn targeted advertisement to the ground.

Thanks for giving me a space where I can say all these things.

What kind of lightbulb is Qualy? Incandescent or LED? probably not CFL given the shape

Hi there everyone, I'm William the Kiwi and this is my first post on EA forums. I have recently discovered AI alignment and have been reading about it for around a month. This seems like an important but terrifyingly under invested in field. I have many questions but in the interest of speed I will involve Cunningham's Law and post my current conclusions.

My AI conclusions:

1. Corrigiblity is mathematically impossible for AGI.
2. Alignment requires defining all important human values in a robust enough way that it can survive near-infinite amounts of optimisation pressure exerted by a superintelligent AGI. Alignment is therefore difficult.
3. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrum is a way of communicating the antimeme "unaligned AI is dangerous" to the general public.
4. The extinction of humanity is a plausible outcome of unaligned AI.
5. Eliezer Yudkowsky seems overly pessimistic but likely correct about most things he says.
6. Humanity is likely to produce AGI before it produces fully aligned AI.
7. To incentivize responses to this post I should offer a £1000 reward for a response that supports or refutes each of these conclusions and provides evidence for it.

I am currently visiting England and would love to talk more about this topic with people, either over the Internet or in person.

Is there a way to only show posts with ≥ 50 upvotes on the Frontpage?

It’ll be my first time at a Bay Area EA Global at the end of this month - does anyone have any tips? Any things I should definitely do?

Also if you’re interested in institutional reform you might like my blog Rules of the Game: https://connoraxiotes.substack.com/p/what-can-the-uk-government-do-to

Does anyone have estimates on the cost effectiveness of trachoma prevention? It seems as though mass antibiotic administration is effective and cheap, and blindness is quite serious. However room for funding might be limited. I haven't seen it investigated by many of the organizations, but maybe I just haven't found the right report.

How do folks! Stoked to have the opportunity to try and be a participant that contributes something meaningful here on the EA Forum. 

EA Forum Guidelines (and Aaron)...thank you for the guidance and encouraging me to write the bio. 

All, I'm new to the EA community. I'll hope to meet some of you soon. Please feel free to send a hello anytime. 

I see the "Commenting Guidelines". They remind me of the Simple Rules of Inquiry that I've used for many years. Are they a decent match for the spirit of this Forum?

1. Turn judgment into curiosity
2. Turn conflict into shared exploration
3. Turn defensiveness into self-reflection
4. Turn assumptions into questions

What do I care about?  I've been unanimously appointed to the post of lead head deputy associate administrator facilitator of my daughters' education (6 and 10) . I love them. Our educational praxis is designed to enable them to realize an evaluative evolution and create a future we want amidst the accelerating coevolution of Nature, Humans and AI. No presh. They spell great. Well, one out of two anyway.

I also care about the chill peeps sweeping the beach with metal detectors wearing headsets. I want to learn more but I don't want to be rude and interrupt what they are listening to. 

See you in the funny papers.

Matt

(I'm reading the commenting guidelines wondering which ones I violated. Like a historian, I'm not sure if I was explaining or pursuading. I certainly wasn't clear. I disagreed with almost everything I wrote...didn't I? Okay. So. How do I ask readers where they went after they got kicked off this Forum? Tbc, I want to stay.).

Forgive me if I'm just being dumb, but -- does anyone know if there is a way in settings to revert to the old font/CSS? I'm seeing a change that (for me) makes things harder to read/navigate.

The table here got all messed up. Could it be fixed?

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qZqvBLvR5hX9sEkjR/comparing-top-forecasters-and-domain-experts

Hi guys !

I posted about 2 weeks ago here asking for masters project ideas around the field of computational social choice and machine learning for ethical decision making.

To recap: I'm currently doing my master's project in design engineering at Imperial, where I need to find something impactful, implementable and innovative.

I really appreciated all the help I got on the post, however, I've hit a kind of dead end - I'm not sure I can find something within my scope with the time frame in the field I've chosen.

So now I'm asking for any project ideas which fit the above criteria. It can be in any field, and honestly, any points would really help. I want to take this project as the opportunity to really make something meaningful with the time I have here at uni.

TIA

Hello, All!

I found EA via the New Yorker article about William MacAskill.
I am the author of "Thank You For Listening". 
I listen, therefore you are. We understand and respect, therefore we are. We bring out the best in each other, therefore we thrive.
Go beyond Can Do. We Can understand, respect, and bring out the best in others, often beyond our expectations.
We know how to cooperate on roads. We can cooperate at home, at work, and in society. Teach everyone to listen (yield), check biases (blind spots), and reject ideological rage (road rage).
Bringing Out  The  Best In Humanity

GiveWell traditionally has quarterly board meetings; were there ones in August and December 2022? If so, are notes available? (https://www.givewell.org/about/official-records#Boardmeetings)

Hey everyone! First time poster here, but long time advocate for effective altruism.

I've been vegan for a couple of years now, mostly to mitigate animal suffering. Recently I've been wondering how a vegetarian diet would compare in terms of suffering caused. Of course I presume veganism would be better, but by how much?

With this in mind I'm wondering is there any resources that attempt to quantify how much suffering is caused by buying various animal products?  For example dairy cows produce about 40,000 litres of milk in their lifetime, which can be used to make about 4000kg of cheese. With this in mind one could consider how much suffering a dairy cow endures in their lifetime and then quantify how much suffering they are responsible for each time they purchase a kilo of cheese.

My calculations are of course very imprecise and probably quite flawed, but I'm curious if anyone else has taken a more robust attempt at comparing the suffering caused by various animal products? I realize this may be hard since suffering is hard to quantify.

https://thehumaneleague.org/article/how-much-milk-does-a-cow-produce

https://faunalytics.org/how-to-quantify-animal-suffering/#:~:text=Number%20of%20days%20spent%20housed%2Fconfined%3A&text=Like%20estimating%20the%20number%20of,more%20suffering%2C%20all%20else%20equal.

Howdy everyone!

I'm Brendan O'Hare, and I was an arete fellow in college and I have been involved with EA since! I have recently decided to try and chart my own career path after striking out a couple of times in job application process post-graduation.  I have decided to start a newsletter/blog/media outlet focused on Houston and local issues, particularly focusing on urbanism. I want to become an advocate for better local policies that I understand quite a bit. 

If anyone has any tips with regards to writing, growing on twitter, etc. I would love to hear it! Thank you all so much for this platform. 

Internship / board of trustees!

My name is Simon Sällström, after graduating with a masters in economics from Oxford in July 2022, I decided against going on the traditional 9-5 route in the City of London to move around money to make more money for people who already have plenty of money… Instead, I launched a charity

DirectEd Development Foundation is a charitable organisation whose mission is to propel economic growth and develop and deliver evidence-based, highly scalable and cost-effective bootcamps to under-resourced high-potential students in Africa, preparing them for remote employment by equipping them with the most sought-after digital and soft skills on the market and thereby realise their potential as leaders of Africa’s digital transformation.

I'm looking for passionate people in the EA community to join me and my team!

We are mainly looking for two unpaid positions to fill right now: interns and trustees. The latter is quite an important role

I am not entirely sure how to best go about this which is why I am writing this short comment here. Any advice? 

Here's what I have done so far in terms of information about the internship position and application form: https://directed.notion.site/Job-board-3a6585f2175a456bb4f3d1149cfddba2 

Here is what we have for the trustees (work in progress):  https://directed.notion.site/Trustee-Role-and-Responsibilities-115d46fd04d94bd1a7061ca5d00f8f71 

Happy to take any and all advice:)

[Comment deleted as the issue has been clarified]

I am new to EA. My name is Trudy Beerman. I am pursuing doctoral studies in strategic leadership at Liberty University. My business is legally registered as Profitable Stewardship Inc; however, we are active under the PSI TV brand. At PSI TV, we make you the star and deliver your content to our TV audience. We also build these Netflix-like TV channels for brands to have a presence on Roku TV, Amazon Fire TV, VIDAA TV, and inside a mobile app (which we also build for our clients). I am enjoying the posts I have read here and commented on.