Quick takes

I live in Australia, and am interested in donating to the fundraising efforts of MIRI and Lightcone Infrastructure, to the tune of $2,000 USD for MIRI and $1,000 USD for Lightcone. Neither of these are tax-advantaged for me. Lightcone is tax advantaged in the US, and MIRI is tax advantaged in a few countries according to their website. 

Anyone want to make a trade, where I donate the money to a tax-advantaged charity in Australia that you would otherwise donate to, and you make these donations? As I understand it, anything in Effective Altruism Austral... (read more)

The mental health EA cause space should explore more experimental, scalable interventions, such as promoting anti-inflammatory diets at school/college cafeterias to reduce depression in young people, or using lighting design to reduce seasonal depression. What I've seen of this cause area so far seems focused on psychotherapy in low-income countries. I feel like we're missing some more out-of-the-box interventions here. Does anyone know of any relevant work along these lines? 

EAs are trying to win the "attention arms race" by not playing. I think this could be a mistake.

• The founding ideas and culture of EA was created and “grew up” in the early 2010s, when online content consumption looked very different.
  • We’ve overall underreacted to shifts in the landscape of where people get ideas and how they engage with them.
  • As a result, we’ve fallen behind, and should consider making a push to bring our messaging and content delivery mechanisms in line with 2020s consumption.
• Also, EA culture is dispositionally calm, rational, and dry.
  • Th

Rate limiting on the EA Forum is too strict. Given that people karma downvote because of disagreement, rather than because of quality or civility — or they judge quality and/or civility largely on the basis of what they agree or disagree with — there is a huge disincentive against expressing unpopular or controversial opinions (relative to the views of active EA Forum users, not necessarily relative to the general public or relevant expert communities) on certain topics.

This is a message I saw recently:

You aren't just rate limited for 24 hours once you fal... (read more)

EA Connect 2025: Personal Takeaways

Background

I'm Ondřej Kubů, a postdoctoral researcher in mathematical physics at ICMAT Madrid, working on integrable Hamiltonian systems. I've engaged with EA ideas since around 2020—initially through reading and podcasts, then ACX meetups, and from 2023 more regularly with Prague EA (now EA Madrid after moving here). I took the GWWC 10% pledge during the event.

My EA focus is longtermist, primarily AI risk. My mathematical background has led me to take seriously arguments that alignment of superintelligent AI may face fund... (read more)

A rule of thumb that I follow for generating data visualizations: One story = one graph

• The best visualizations are extremely simple and easy to read: e.g. a line or bar chart that tells you exactly what you care about
• If you are struggling to figure out what to visualize, zoom out and ask yourself: what story are you trying to tell? Once you have clarity on that, figure out the simplest way to illustrate this.
• If you have multiple stories to tell, make multiple graphs :)

Some made up stories and solutions:

• Total engagement hours steadily went down over this ye

• Re the new 2024 Rethink Cause Prio survey: "The EA community should defer to mainstream experts on most topics, rather than embrace contrarian views. [“Defer to experts”]" 3% strongly agree, 18% somewhat agree, 35% somewhat disagree, 15% strongly disagree.
  • This seems pretty bad to me, especially for a group that frames itself as recognizing intellectual humility/we (base rate for an intellectual movement) are so often wrong.
  • (Charitable interpretation) It's also just the case that EAs tend to have lots of views that they're being contrarian about because the

I have the impression that the most effective interventions, especially in global health/poverty, are usually temporary, in the sense that you need to keep reinvesting regularly, usually because the intervention provides a consumable good; for example malaria chemoprevention: it needs to be provided yearly. In contrast, solutions that seem more permanent in the long-term (e.g. a hypothetical malaria vaccination, or building infrastructure), are typically much less cost-effective on the margin because of their high cost.

How do we balance pure marginal effec... (read more)

It looks like you might have to wait till tomorrow for a 'Donation Election Winners' post (though you can see the final votes on the banner). Until then - here are the anonymised votes to play with.