Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
In celebration of still being alive and fighting, we are giving away 1,000 Amazon e-books of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. Feel free to send a copy to yourself, a loved one, or a friend—we need all hands on deck.
Today marks exactly one year since If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soare...
A year ago I posted that YCombinator (YC) companies didn’t seem to be growing faster since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. I reran that experiment and found that 2023+ YC companies are arguably growing a bit faster than pre-2023 companies (including AfterQuery, ...
https://data.mercyforanimals.org/
Does anyone know of any more examples of EA orgs doing analysis outside of Excel Spreadsheets/Google Sheets - using e.g. Guesstimate, Jupyter Notebook etc?
Faunalytics is an animal advocacy charity and one of ACE’s top charities. They summarize and interpret a lot of academic research, as well as conducting their own research including full data analyses. I volunteered with them a few years ago and would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to learn research, writing, or data analysis skills. They’re also really good about doing transparent and reproducible research by releasing the code they use.
Here’s a recent article conducting a data analysis of 15 years of data on wildlife trade: https://faunalytics.org/wildlife-imports/
Here’s the main data analysis I worked on, analyzing Faunalytics’ proprietary polling data on animal welfare attitudes. We released the data, a writeup of the methodology, and all the code for the analysis on OSF: https://osf.io/2b86k/
GiveDirectly has been using machine learning to identify people in extreme poverty.
I do not know of other examples but I would be interested in knowing the data use/needs of EA organizations