What COVID-19 questions should Open Philanthropy pay Good Judgment to work on?

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...

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Let's taboo the V-word

lincolnq·2d ago·8m read

“How long have you been v*g*n?” This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers. But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...

Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level

abrahamrowe, mal_graham🔸·2d ago·16m read

AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix. Cross-posted from Good Structures. Executive Summary * Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...

Recent opportunities to take action

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As part of our work on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, we have contracted Good Judgment Inc. to expand its efforts to aggregate, publish, and track forecasts about the COVID-19 pandemic, with the hope that these forecasts can help improve planning by health security professionals and the broader public, limit the spread of the virus, and save lives.

The initial set of predictions, available here, are aggregated from forecasts by professional “Superforecasters,” who qualified by being in the most accurate 1-2% of forecasters from a large-scale, government-funded series of forecasting tournaments that ran from 2011-2015 (see Superforecasting) and, since then, by being in the top handful of forecasters from Good Judgment’s public forecasting platform, Good Judgment Open.

We may commission additional forecasts related to COVID-19 in the coming months, and we welcome suggestions of well-formed questions for which regularly updated forecasts would be especially helpful to public health professionals and the broader public. If you would like to suggest one or more questions for potential forecasting, please fill out this short form, especially if you are a medical or public health professional, and especially if you know how to state the forecasting question(s) precisely enough that it’s clear how to decide later how the question(s) resolved.

We’ve been funding scientific research and policy analysis on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness for several years and are glad to support the work many of our grantees are already doing to respond to this crisis. We’re continuing to support them and are pursuing other opportunities to help mitigate the effects of this pandemic, which we expect to share more about in the future.