This is a special post for quick takes by John Salter. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Curated and popular this week
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[Edits on March 10th for clarity, two sub-sections added]
Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions.
Speaking somewhat roughly, with EA as a movement coming of age in an era where democratic institutions and the rule-based international order were not fundamentally questioned, it seems easy to underestimate how much the world is currently changing and how much riskier a world of stronger institutional and democratic backsliding and weakened international norms might be.
Of course, working on these issues might be intractable and possibly there's nothing highly effective for EAs to do on the margin given much attention to these issues from society at large. So, I am not here to confidently state we should be working on these issues more.
But I do think in a situation of more downside risk with regards to broad system-level changes and significantly more fluidity, it seems at least worth rigorously asking whether we should shift more attention to work that is less surgical (working on specific risks) and more systemic (working on institutional quality, indirect risk factors, etc.).
While there have been many posts along those lines over the past months and there are of course some EA organizations working on these issues, it stil appears like a niche focus in the community and none of the major EA and EA-adjacent orgs (including the one I work for, though I am writing this in a personal capacity) seem to have taken it up as a serious focus and I worry it might be due to baked-in assumptions about the relative value of such work that are outdated in a time where the importance of systemic work has changed in the face of greater threat and fluidity.
When the world seems to
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Forethought[1] is a new AI macrostrategy research group cofounded by Max Dalton, Will MacAskill, Tom Davidson, and Amrit Sidhu-Brar.
We are trying to figure out how to navigate the (potentially rapid) transition to a world with superintelligent AI systems. We aim to tackle the most important questions we can find, unrestricted by the current Overton window.
More details on our website.
Why we exist
We think that AGI might come soon (say, modal timelines to mostly-automated AI R&D in the next 2-8 years), and might significantly accelerate technological progress, leading to many different challenges. We don’t yet have a good understanding of what this change might look like or how to navigate it. Society is not prepared.
Moreover, we want the world to not just avoid catastrophe: we want to reach a really great future. We think about what this might be like (incorporating moral uncertainty), and what we can do, now, to build towards a good future.
Like all projects, this started out with a plethora of Google docs. We ran a series of seminars to explore the ideas further, and that cascaded into an organization.
This area of work feels to us like the early days of EA: we’re exploring unusual, neglected ideas, and finding research progress surprisingly tractable. And while we start out with (literally) galaxy-brained schemes, they often ground out into fairly specific and concrete ideas about what should happen next. Of course, we’re bringing principles like scope sensitivity, impartiality, etc to our thinking, and we think that these issues urgently need more morally dedicated and thoughtful people working on them.
Research
Research agendas
We are currently pursuing the following perspectives:
* Preparing for the intelligence explosion: If AI drives explosive growth there will be an enormous number of challenges we have to face. In addition to misalignment risk and biorisk, this potentially includes: how to govern the development of new weapons of mass destr
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*Disclaimer* I am writing this post in a personal capacity; the opinions I express are my own and do not represent my employer.
I think that more people and orgs (especially nonprofits) should consider negotiating the cost of sizable expenses. In my experience, there is usually nothing to lose by respectfully asking to pay less, and doing so can sometimes save thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per hour. This is because negotiating doesn’t take very much time[1], savings can persist across multiple years, and counterparties can be surprisingly generous with discounts. Here are a few examples of expenses that may be negotiable:
For organizations
* Software or news subscriptions
* Of 35 corporate software and news providers I’ve negotiated with, 30 have been willing to provide discounts. These discounts range from 10% to 80%, with an average of around 40%.
* Leases
* A friend was able to negotiate a 22% reduction in the price per square foot on a corporate lease and secured a couple months of free rent. This led to >$480,000 in savings for their nonprofit. Other negotiable parameters include:
* Square footage counted towards rent costs
* Lease length
* A tenant improvement allowance
* Certain physical goods (e.g., smart TVs)
* Buying in bulk can be a great lever for negotiating smaller items like covid tests, and can reduce costs by 50% or more.
* Event/retreat venues (both venue price and smaller items like food and AV)
* Hotel blocks
* A quick email with the rates of comparable but more affordable hotel blocks can often save ~10%.
* Professional service contracts with large for-profit firms (e.g., IT contracts, office internet coverage)
* Insurance premiums (though I am less confident that this is negotiable)
For many products and services, a nonprofit can qualify for a discount simply by providing their IRS determination letter or getting verified on platforms like TechSoup.
In my experience, most vendors and companies
It seems that part of the reason communism is so widely discredited is the clear contrast between neighboring countries that pursued more free-market policies. This makes me wonder— practicality aside, what would happen if effective altruists concentrated all their global health and development efforts into a single country, using similar neighboring countries as the comparison group?
Given that EA-driven philanthropy accounts for only about 0.02% of total global aid, perhaps the influence EA's approach could have by definitively proving its impact would be greater than trying to maximise the good it does directly.
This is a really interesting idea and would obviously need a relatively uncorrupt country that is on board with the project.
To some extent this kind of thing already happens, with aid organisations focusing their funding on countries which use it well. Rwanda is an interesting example of this over the last 20 years as they have attracted huge foreign funding after their dictator basically fixed low level corruption and organized the country surprisingly well. This has led to dis proportionate improvements in healthcare and education compared with surrounding countries, although economically the jury is still out.
The big problem in my eyes then is how do you know it's your interventions baking the difference, rather than just really good governance - very hard to tease apart.
Superficially, it sounds similar to the idea of charter cities. The idea does seem (at face value) to have some merit, but I suspect that the execution of the idea is where lots of problems occur.
So, practically aside, it seems like a massive amount of effort/investment/funding would allow a small country to progress rapidly toward less suffering and better life.
My general impression is that "we don't have a randomized control trial to prove the efficacy of this intervention" isn't the most common reason why people don't get helped. Maybe some combination of lack of resources, politics & entrenched interests, and trade-offs are the big ones? I don't know, but I'm sure some folks around here have research papers and textbooks about it.
Feels unlikely either that it would create an actually valid natural experiment (as you acknowledge, it's not a huge proportion of aid, and there are a lot of other factors that affect a country) or persuade people to do aid differently.
Particularly when EA's GHD programmes tend to be already focused on stuff which is well-evidenced at a granular level (malaria cures and vitamin supplementation) and targeted at specific countries with those problems (not all developing countries have malaria), by organizations that are not necessarily themselves EA, and a lot of non-EA funders are also trying to solve those problems in similar or identical ways.
Also feels like it would be a poor decision for, say, a Charity Entrepreneurship founder trying to solve a problem she identified as one she could make a major difference with based on her extensive knowledge of poverty in India deciding to try the programme in a potentially different Guinean context she doesn't have the same background understanding of simply because other EAs happened to have diverted funding to Guinea for signalling purposes.
Y-Combinator wants to fund Mechanistic Interpretability startups
"Understanding model behavior is very challenging, but we believe that in contexts where trust is paramount it is essential for an AI model to be interpretable. Its responses need to be explainable.
For society to reap the full benefits of AI, more work needs to be done on explainable AI. We are interested in funding people building new interpretable models or tools to explain the output of existing models."
Link
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs (Scroll to 12)
What they look for in startup founders
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/64-what-makes-great-founders-stand-out
ChatGPT deep-research users: What type of stuff does it perform well on? How good is it overall?
Bit the bullet and paid them $200. So far, it's astonishingly good. If you're in the UK/EU, you can get a refund no questions asked within 14 days so if you're on the fence I'd definitely suggest giving it a go
What AI tools have made the biggest difference to your or your organisation's productivity?
This was from 2018. Does anyone have up-to-date estimates of the value per co-founder per charity?
I'm hiring a full-time remote administrator from an LMIC to take repetitive tasks off my core teams hands. Got any tips on how best to hire / manage them?
It's often easier to get responses from the most senior people in a field.
1. Most people are too intimidated to get in touch with them
2. They're senior for a reason - they tend to be way more productive and opportunity seeking
3. They have VAs, secretaries, and other people to bring serious requests to their attention.
I work in global mental health, and am looking for charities to refer clients to me. The two best-connected people in my field (according to GPT-4) are Dr Vikram Patel and Dr Shekhar Saxena. I sent out ~50 identical cold emails to people I thought could connect me to relevant charities / hospitals etc. Vikram and Saxena were the only two people to reply!
I've also seen this argued by Tim Ferris and other highly productive people, but it resonated so poorly with my prior beliefs that I didn't update sufficiently. The implications here are huge - it could be way easier to gain access to influential people than the average EA perceives, and influence is power-law distributed!
I've strongly had this experience. I have written 5 NYT bestsellers a cold email, and 3 replied. I get good rates with C-levels and I get the poorest rates at lower levels.
But it strongly does depend on your story or organisation in my experience. Your org has a strong story so it warrants a reply. But I did a lot of marketing and some PR for dime in a dozen companies and if you lack a strong story, you can expect reply rates of senior people to be close to zero.
Yes, though use this power wisely. I think it's good to imagine how much you'd pay to talk to said person and scale my effort as the number gets bigger.
If I waste this person's time, they may become less willing to be open and hence I'll have damaged the commons.
Will do now