Quick takes

You should volunteer at your first EAG! (Especially if you are a student or early career)

• If you don’t have a network in EA, EAG’s can be overwhelming. Volunteering gives you a ready-made, organic network.
• Volunteering is pretty chill - a lot of the shifts aren’t that hard.
• At your first EAG, it’s unlikely that you are using your time so efficiently that a few hours of volunteering would cut into the value of your conference.

Maybe my biggest medium-term worry about transformative AI, other than the takeover stuff, is a constellation of concerns I sometimes abbreviate to "political economy." Right now a large fraction of humans in democracies can live and support their families as a direct result of voluntarily exchanging their labor. It'd take active acts of violence to break from this (pretty good, all things considered) status quo. As a peacetime norm, this is unusually good relative to the history of human civilization. 

At some point in the future (in the "good" future... (read more)

Thinking of drafting a post on war crimes, trying to answer the following puzzles:

1. Why do we have a notion of war crimes at all, given how bad war itself is?
2. Why are some things war crimes and not others?
3. Why do precursor notions to war crimes appear, independently, in essentially every culture that has fought wars at scale?
4. Given that essentially every culture has also broken these norms, sometimes spectacularly, why does the norm always come back, and often come back stronger?

Common answers to these questions seem profoundly misguided. The naive answer, that... (read more)

A quick reminder that applications for EA Global: London 2026 close this Sunday (May 10)!

We already have more applications than last year, and this looks set to be our biggest EAG yet (again)! If you've been meaning to apply but haven't gotten around to it, this is your sign.

The admissions bar is more accessible than people often assume. If you're working on or seriously exploring a high-impact problem, you should apply.

This is the EAG I've been most excited to put together yet. I'd love to see you all there.

📍 InterContinental London, The O2 · 29-31 May 2... (read more)

So... what's the general take on the hantavirus outbreak?

I have been disappointed by the support some EAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share others’ outrage at the outcome of the state animal cruelty investigation, which found serious animal cruelty law violations but led to a settlement that still permits Ridglan to sell beagles through July and to continue in-house experimentation. But I personally think the tactics used in the recent open rescues, including property damage and forced entry to remove animals, violate reasonable moral bounds on what actions are p... (read more)

Earning to give is lonely and requires repeated decisions. This is bad.

If you're earning to give, you are lucky if you have one EtG team-mate. The people you talk to every day do not have moral intuitions similar to yours, and your actions seem weird to them.

If you do direct work, the psychological default every day is to wake up and do work. You are surrounded by people who think the work is important, and whose moral values at least rhyme with your own.

If you earn to give, most days you do not give (you're probably paid bi-weekly, and transaction costs d... (read more)

Somewhat meta point on epistemic modesty, calling it out here because it is a pattern that has deeply frustrated me about EA/rationalism for as long as I have known them: 
(making a quick take rather than commenting due to an app.operation_not_allowed error - I'm responding to @Linch's quick take on war crimes)
I guess these are just EA/rationalist norms, but an approach that glosses major positions as being so quickly dismissible strikes me as insufficiently epistemically modest. I would expect such a treatment will fail to properly consider alternativ... (read more)

At what level of compute spending will AI Safety research be cut off from being considered effective altruism (if any)?

Of course, saving humanity from misaligned AI could be argued to be close to priceless. But how many experiments have a direct theory of change (ToC) of how it's going to mitigate existential risk?  Perhaps a general one is fine at low compute ("it only costs $10 and 'control research' is generally thought to be a good research agenda").  

But what about $5,000? What about $10,000? These numbers start to compare to or surpass what... (read more)

huh. I recalled "xyz ways to become unstoppably agentic", an old EA forum post, that me and some friends liked quite a lot. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pc3CFbYxPXgyjoDpB/seven-ways-to-become-unstoppably-agentic

it appears the author has retracted it? or some other notion of it being no longer readable. I'm curious for their take on why they did that. 

(in general when this happens to one of your posts, seems much better to edit the title from xyz to [retracted] xyz and leave a comment explaining why your mind changed) 

The 85 million children we cannot count

New wars are starting before the old ones have ended. Humanitarian budgets are being cut with a chainsaw. And in this time of ultra-prioritisation, even more than before, we are asked to prove that every euro or dollar is spent on saving lives.

I have been working in this sector for 15 years. I have seen its inefficiencies up close. I have also seen what it holds together.

For the last few years, I have been exploring Effective Altruism and asking whether its principles can be brought into mainstream humanitarian aid. W... (read more)

Has anyone talked about the role the Green Revolution probably played in making factory farming economically viable? 

Among other enabling factors (e.g. antibiotics), factory farming, especially of pigs and poultry, depends on cheap grain feed. The system only works at scale if feed costs are low enough to make confinement viable relative to pasture. The Green Revolution roughly tripled global grain production between 1960 and 2000, and maize in particular became cheap enough to feed to animals at industrial volumes.

Every time I see a celebration of No... (read more)

I'm pledging[1] to stop[2] saving[3] additional[4] money[5] & donate instead.

Fine print:

[1] This pledge is only good until 2030 unless renewed, and becomes invalid if I start working at a nonprofit.

[2] I'm still allowed to max out my 401k, partially since I have a 50% match there.

[3] Spending money is fine. I only spend 5% my gross, so that isn't the problem.

[4] I'm allowed to keep up with inflation, should the stock market not already do so.

[5] I'm allowed to keep saving illiquid equity, although I am encouraged to liquidate to the extent feasible to align with the spirit of the pledge.