Quick takes
Very few of my peers are having kids. My husband and I are the youngest parents at the Princeton University daycare at 31 years old. The next youngest parent is 3 years older than us, and his kid is a year younger than ours. Considering median age of first birth at the national level is 30 years old, it seems like a potential problem that the national median is the Princeton minimum.
I wonder what the birth rate is specifically among American parents with/doing STEM PhDs. I'm guessing it's extremely low for people under the age of 45. Possibly low eno...
Some of this seems to be inherent to a modern society (High birth rates in past society were because of high mortality rates, women being treated as baby factories, etc.), but in my own experience the reason the birth rate is so low is that people simply can't afford to have children.
In Japan and South Korea, the "salaryman culture" is such that employees are expected to devote their entire lives to their employers, to the extent of sleeping in the office at times. Needless to say, this makes it extremely difficult to have a relationship.
In sho...
A corporation exhibits emergent behavior, over which no individual employee has full control. Because the unregulated market selects for profit and nothing else, any successful corporation becomes a kind of "financial paperclip optimizer". To prevent this, the economic system must change.
Paul Graham about getting good at technology (bold is mine):
...How do you get good at technology? And how do you choose which technology to get good at? Both of those questions turn out to have the same answer: work on your own projects. Don't try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most. You'll work much harder on something you're interested in than something you're doing because you think you're supposed to.
If you're
Everyone who seems to be writing policy papers/ doing technical work seems to be keeping generative AI at the back of their mind, when framing their work or impact.
This narrow-eyed focus on gen AI might almost certainly be net-negative for us- unknowingly or unintentionally ignoring ripple effects of the gen AI boom in other fields (like robotics companies getting more funding leading to more capabilities, and that leads to new types of risks).
And guess who benefits if we do end up getting good evals/standards in place for gen AI? It seem...
This WHO press release was a good reminder of the power of immunization – a new study forthcoming publication in The Lancet reports that (liberally quoting / paraphrasing the release)
- global immunization efforts have saved an estimated 154 million lives over the past 50 years, 146 million of them children under 5 and 101 million of them infants
- for each life saved through immunization, an average of 66 years of full health were gained – with a total of 10.2 billion full health years gained over the five decades
- measles vaccination accounted for 60% of t
American Philosophical Association (APA) announces two $10,000 AI2050 Prizes for philosophical work related to AI, with June 23, 2024 deadline:
https://dailynous.com/2024/04/25/apa-creates-new-prizes-for-philosophical-research-on-ai/
First in-ovo sexing in the US
Egg Innovations announced that they are "on track to adopt the technology in early 2025." Approximately 300 million male chicks are ground up alive in the US each year (since only female chicks are valuable) and in-ovo sexing would prevent this.
UEP originally promised to eliminate male chick culling by 2020; needless to say, they didn't keep that commitment. But better late than never!
Congrats to everyone working on this, including @Robert - Innovate Animal Ag, who founded an organization devoted to pushing this tec...
How many chicks per year will Egg Innovations' change save? (The announcement link is blocked for me.)
In order to be able to communicate about malaria from a fundraising perspective, it would be amazing if there would be a documentary about malaria. Personal compelling stories that anyone can relate to. Not about the science behind the disease, as that wouldn't work probably. Just like "An inconvenient truth", but then around Malaria. I am truly baffled I can't find anything close to what I was hoping would exist already. Anyone knows why this is? Or am I googling wrong?
In this "quick take", I want to summarize some my idiosyncratic views on AI risk.
My goal here is to list just a few ideas that cause me to approach the subject differently from how I perceive most other EAs view the topic. These ideas largely push me in the direction of making me more optimistic about AI, and less likely to support heavy regulations on AI.
(Note that I won't spend a lot of time justifying each of these views here. I'm mostly stating these points without lengthy justifications, in case anyone is curious. These ideas can perhaps inform ...
Explicit +1 to what Owen is saying here.
(Given that I commented with some counterarguments, I thought I would explicitly note my +1 here.)
My recommended readings/resources for community builders/organisers
- CEA's groups resource centre, naturally
- This handbook on community organising
- High Output Management by Andrew Groves
- How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit
- LifeLabs's coaching questions (great for 1-1s with organisers you're supporting/career coachees)
- The 2-Hour Cocktail Party
- Centola's work on social change, e.g., the book Change: How to Make Big Things Happen
- Han's work on organising, e.g., How Organisations Develop Activists (I wrote up some notes here)
- This 80k article on community
Given how bird flu is progressing (spread in many cows, virologists believing rumors that humans are getting infected but no human-to-human spread yet), this would be a good time to start a protest movement for biosafety/against factory farming in the US.
virologists believing rumors that humans are getting infected
What are you referring to here?
We already have confirmation that it happened hundreds of times that people got infected with H5N1 from contact with animals (only 2 cases in the US so far, but one of them very recently). We can guess that there might be some percentage of unreported extra cases, but I'd expect that to be small because of the virus's high mortality rate in its current form (and how much vigilance there is now).
So, I'm confused whether you're referring to confirmed information with ...
Consider donating all or most of your Mana on Manifold to charity before May 1.
Manifold is making multiple changes to the way Manifold works. You can read their announcement here. The main reason for donating now is that Mana will be devalued from the current 1 USD:100 Mana to 1 USD:1000 Mana on May 1. Thankfully, the 10k USD/month charity cap will not be in place until then.
Also this part might be relevant for people with large positions they want to sell now:
...One week may not be enough time for users with larger portfolios to liquidate and donate. We wa
Forum post saying the same thing, with some discussion: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SM3YzTsXmQ6BaFcsL/you-probably-want-to-donate-any-manifold-currency-this-week
Vaccines saved 150M+ lives over the past 50 years, including 100M+ infants and nearly 100M lives from Measles alone:
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/new-data-shows-vaccines-have-saved-154-million-lives-past-50-years
https://www.who.int/news/item/24-04-2024-global-immunization-efforts-have-saved-at-least-154-million-lives-over-the-past-50-years
This is an extremely "EA" request from me but I feel like we need a word for people (i.e. me) who are Vegans but will eat animal products if they're about to be thrown out. OpportuVegan? UtilaVegan?
I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer!
The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3
I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advis...
Congratulations to you for being accepted into the incubator program. Am still expecting mine as well.
An alternate stance on moderation (from @Habryka.)
This is from this comment responding to this post about there being too many bans on LessWrong. Note how the LessWrong is less moderated than here in that it (I guess) responds to individual posts less often, but more moderated in that I guess it rate limits people more without reason.
I found it thought provoking. I'd recommend reading it.
...Thanks for making this post!
One of the reasons why I like rate-limits instead of bans is that it allows people to complain about the rate-limiting and to parti
I do think we could potentially give more “near-ban” rate limits, such as the 1 comment/3 days. The main benefit of this I see is as allowing the user to write content disagreeing with their ban.
I think the banned individual should almost always get at least one final statement to disagree with the ban after its pronouncement. Even the Romulans allowed (will allow?) that. Absent unusual circumstances, I think they -- and not the mods -- should get the last word, so I would also allow a single reply if the mods responded to the final statement.
More generall...
Ben West recently mentioned that he would be excited about a common application. It got me thinking a little about it. I don't have the technical/design skills to create such a system, but I want to let my mind wander a little bit on the topic. This is just musings and 'thinking out out,' so don't take any of this too seriously.
What would the benefits be for some type of common application? For the applicant: send an application to a wider variety of organizations with less effort. For the organization: get a wider variety of applicants.
Why not just have t...
With the US presidential election coming up this year, some of y’all will probably want to discuss it.[1] I think it’s a good time to restate our politics policy. tl;dr Partisan politics content is allowed, but will be restricted to the Personal Blog category. On-topic policy discussions are still eligible as frontpage material.
- ^
Or the expected UK elections.
I don't think we have a good answer to what happens after we do auditing of an AI model and find something wrong.
Given that our current understanding of AI's internal workings is at least a generation behind, it's not exactly like we can isolate what mechanism is causing certain behaviours. (Would really appreciate any input here- I see very little to no discussion on this in governance papers; it's almost as if policy folks are oblivious to the technical hurdles which await working groups)
Dustin Moskovitz claims "Tesla has committed consumer fraud on a massive scale", and "people are going to jail at the end"
https://www.threads.net/@moskov/post/C6KW_Odvky0/
Not super EA relevant, but I guess relevant inasmuch as Moskovitz funds us and Musk has in the past too. I think if this were just some random commentator I wouldn't take it seriously at all, but a bit more inclined to believe Dustin will take some concrete action. Not sure I've read everything he's said about it, I'm not used to how Threads works
The "non-tweet" feels vague and unsubsantiated (at this point anyway). I hope we'll get a full article and explanation as to what he means exactly because obviously he's making HUGE calls.