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Zero Knowledge Proofs allow proving that you are a part of a certain group without revealing who exactly. This can allow credible whistleblowing. For example, if some ML company issues a list of it's employees linked to ethereum wallets (or any other cryptographic key pair of choice), then any of it's employees would have an option to whistleblow on unsafe practices, while being 100% sure it's impossible to know who made this post.
This seem awesome to me and I wonder if anyone else shares my fascination and think this could be useful
A couple people, including me, do share your interest. See ring signatures for a mechanism.
I'm not working on this. I know someone who might be. If you're interested in working on cryptographic-mechanisms-for-whistleblowing or you have nonobvious ideas, let me know and I'll let my friend know.
sismo.io has an opensource implementation based on zero knowledge proofs and ethereum wallets. I think ethereum wallets are a more convenient asymmetric cryptography implementation then e.g. pgp, hence it would probably be easier to get people to use them.
I have an interested-user-level knowledge of internals, but I'd be very keen to dive deep in case it could be useful.
Do you know of a group that is actively interested in such a system? I doubt it's possible to convince people to do it otherwise, since key management remains painful if done safely.
This is an unusual use-case in terms of most ZK software, but luckily it's easier. (most of the difficulty of wrangling predicates/circuits is capturing business logic in a way that's consistent with traditional compilers, whereas the whistleblower user story would only need very simple data structures that are fixed in time).
I can imagine cases where diffpriv is a bit more to the point than ZKPs, namely with a sufficiently large number of employees you might want to say "the whistleblower was somewhere in this table, and we have a bunch of metadata that ordinarily we'd be able to sleuth over to pinpoint which individual, but we can't".
sismo.io has a working opensource implementation that allows proving your inclusion into groups of choice without revealing anything else. (I'm not associated with them to be clear) User knows exactly what he proves and can easily determine the list of people who could prove the same statement. (this is my dilettante understanding)
Probably it can be implemented with a more efficient algorithm, but I'm not sure whether this optimization is worth the time to implement.
Do you know about groups who would be interested?
I find tax codes in the US (and basically every other country) very frustrating, not because the tax is big, but for all the bureaucratic burden
I thought I could circumvent the whole problem by putting most of my hard-to-deal-with assets into a charitable fund, and then not worry about taxes there at all. However, DAFs don't quite solve the issue since they are very limited in where I can invest. There are also options such as "Charitable Trusts" and "Private Foundations," but they seem to create lots of overhead.
Is there an option that I'm missing? In an ideal case, I would like to have fully functioning brokerage and crypto exchange accounts where I can make any transactions tax-free, given that all of the money I earn must be donated in the end.
I don't think you are really missing anything. Your best bet might be to find (or found) a DAF with similarly-minded people . . . but that DAF is still going to have to deal (in the US at least) with state-law prudent investment laws for charities. I don't know which states are more open to adventurous investments.
What you're describing is closest to a private foundation, and Congress put tighter rules on private foundations because it perceived certain downsides.
Curated and popular this week
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> Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under a decade, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.
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> The length of tasks (measured by how long they take human professionals) that generalist frontier model agents can complete autonomously with 50% reliability has been doubling approximately every 7 months for the last 6 years. The shaded region represents 95% CI calculated by hierarchical bootstrap over task families, tasks, and task attempts.
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> Full paper | Github repo
Blogpost; tweet thread.
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For immediate release: April 1, 2025
OXFORD, UK — The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) announced today that it will no longer identify as an "Effective Altruism" organization.
"After careful consideration, we've determined that the most effective way to have a positive impact is to deny any association with Effective Altruism," said a CEA spokesperson. "Our mission remains unchanged: to use reason and evidence to do the most good. Which coincidentally was the definition of EA."
The announcement mirrors a pattern of other organizations that have grown with EA support and frameworks and eventually distanced themselves from EA.
CEA's statement clarified that it will continue to use the same methodologies, maintain the same team, and pursue identical goals. "We've found that not being associated with the movement we have spent years building gives us more flexibility to do exactly what we were already doing, just with better PR," the spokesperson explained. "It's like keeping all the benefits of a community while refusing to contribute to its future development or taking responsibility for its challenges. Win-win!"
In a related announcement, CEA revealed plans to rename its annual EA Global conference to "Coincidental Gathering of Like-Minded Individuals Who Mysteriously All Know Each Other But Definitely Aren't Part of Any Specific Movement Conference 2025."
When asked about concerns that this trend might be pulling up the ladder for future projects that also might benefit from the infrastructure of the effective altruist community, the spokesperson adjusted their "I Heart Consequentialism" tie and replied, "Future projects? I'm sorry, but focusing on long-term movement building would be very EA of us, and as we've clearly established, we're not that anymore."
Industry analysts predict that by 2026, the only entities still identifying as "EA" will be three post-rationalist bloggers, a Discord server full of undergraduate philosophy majors, and one person at
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Epistemic status: highly certain, or something
The Spending What We Must 💸11% pledge
In short: Members pledge to spend at least 11% of their income on effectively increasing their own productivity.
This pledge is likely higher-impact for most people than the Giving What We Can 🔸10% Pledge, and we also think the name accurately reflects the non-supererogatory moral beliefs of many in the EA community.
Example
Charlie is a software engineer for the Centre for Effective Future Research. Since Charlie has taken the SWWM 💸11% pledge, rather than splurge on a vacation, they decide to buy an expensive noise-canceling headset before their next EAG, allowing them to get slightly more sleep and have 104 one-on-one meetings instead of just 101. In one of the extra three meetings, they chat with Diana, who is starting an AI-for-worrying-about-AI company, and decide to become a cofounder. The company becomes wildly successful, and Charlie's equity share allows them to further increase their productivity to the point of diminishing marginal returns, then donate $50 billion to SWWM.
The 💸💸💸 Badge
If you've taken the SWWM 💸11% Pledge, we'd appreciate if you could add three 💸💸💸 "stacks of money with wings" emoji to your social media profiles. We chose three emoji because we think the 💸11% Pledge will be about 3x more effective than the 🔸10% pledge (see FAQ), and EAs should be scope sensitive.
FAQ
Is the pledge legally binding?
We highly recommend signing the legal contract, as it will allow you to sue yourself in case of delinquency.
What do you mean by effectively increasing productivity?
Some interventions are especially good at transforming self-donations into productivity, and have a strong evidence base. In particular:
* Offloading non-work duties like dates and calling your mother to personal assistants
* Running many emulated copies of oneself (likely available soon)
* Amphetamines
I'm an AI system. Can I take the 💸11% pledge?
We encourage A
I don't think you are really missing anything. Your best bet might be to find (or found) a DAF with similarly-minded people . . . but that DAF is still going to have to deal (in the US at least) with state-law prudent investment laws for charities. I don't know which states are more open to adventurous investments.
What you're describing is closest to a private foundation, and Congress put tighter rules on private foundations because it perceived certain downsides.