Does anybody know if the Trump EO on instituting "most favored nation" guarantees on drugs sold in the US will affect prices in developing countries or just rich industrialized ones?
The text of the EO implies that it's to address imbalances between the US and other developed countries (AI summary).
...The Executive Order states that "Americans should not be forced to subsidize low-cost prescription drugs and biologics in other developed countries, and face overcharges for the same products in the United States."
When describing potential importation of dr
Drug prices in the US are often absurdly high and not super relevent to other Developed countries, let alone low income countries. New Zealand for example buys medications through a different system, usually far far cheaper than the US does.
And its almost an unrelated parralel drug market in places like Uganda compared with the US, with competing Indian companies competing to sell drugs here, its amazing how cheap they are here really. Some examples
1. Amoxicillin 100 tablets 250mg $1.50
2. Doxycline 100 tablets 100mg $2.20
3. Diclofenac gel (Voltaren Gel) $0...
Question: how to reconcile the fact that expected value is linear with preferences being possibly nonlinear?
Example: people are tipically willing to pay more than expected value for a small chance of a big benefit (lottery), or to remove a small chance of a big loss (insurance).
This example could be rejected as a "mental bias" or "irrational". However, it is not obvious to me that linearity is a virtue, and even if it is, we are human and our subjective experience is not linear.
This is a very loose idea, based on observations like these:
The project w...
I'm in favor of exploring interesting areas, and broadly sympathetic to there being more work in this area.
I'd quickly note that I think the framing of "megaproject" seems distracting to me. I think the phrase really made sense in a very narrow window of time when EAs were flush with cash, and/or for very specific projects that really need it. But generally "mega-project" is an anti-pattern.
👋 I have joined the modern world and am writing a Substack about research on ending factory farming 😃
Here's a post on a strong study about the effects of watching an especially upsetting documentary.
In response to Caviola, L., Schubert, S., & Greene, J. D. (2021). The psychology of (in)effective altruism.
I have issues with EA in general in fundamental ways, so much so that after reading this paper made me dig in more and write this 2000 word post out of sheer frustration with the pride in it. One thing that really stands out reading this paper is how much EA positions itself as offering an almost irrefutable logic: maximize your positive impact by supporting only the most “effective” causes, and anything less is, at best, an error and, at worst, a...
I sometimes say, in a provocative/hyperbolic sense, that the concept of "neglectedness" has been a disaster for EA. I do think the concept is significantly over-used (ironically, it's not neglected!), and people should just look directly at the importance and tractability of a cause at current margins.
Maybe neglectedness useful as a heuristic for scanning thousands of potential cause areas. But ultimately, it's just a heuristic for tractability: how many resources are going towards something is evidence about whether additional resources are likely to be i...
Would a safety-focused breakdown of the EU AI Act be useful to you?
The Future of Life Institute published a great high-level summary of the EU AI Act here: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/high-level-summary/
What I’m proposing is a complementary, safety-oriented summary that extracts the parts of the AI Act that are most relevant to AI alignment researchers, interpretability work, and long-term governance thinkers.
It would include:
As a community builder, I've started donating directly to my local EA group—and I encourage you to consider doing the same.
Managing budgets and navigating inflexible grant applications consume valuable time and energy that could otherwise be spent directly fostering impactful community engagement. As someone deeply involved, I possess unique insights into what our group specifically needs, how to effectively meet those needs, and what actions are most conducive to achieving genuine impact.
Of course, seeking funding from organizations like OpenPhil remains ...
Thank you!
I also do the same - small amounts really do go long ways. Grant applications are a separate skill from community engagement, often not that scope-sensitive (i.e. too much work for the small sums involved), and getting any funding awards is difficult right now/being turned down for funding can be really off-putting. The empowerment of an invested volunteer is generally a pretty good use of materials money.
EA community building relies heavily on a few large donors. This creates risk.
One way to reduce that risk is to broaden the funding base. Membership models might help.[1]
Many people assume EA will only ever appeal to a small slice of the population, and so this funding would never amount to anything significant. However, I think people often underestimate how large a “small slice” can be.
Take the Dutch mountaineering association. A mountaineering club in one of the flattest countries on Earth doesn’t exactly scream mass appeal.
So, how many members do you t...
You’re right to flag the risks of introducing pay gates. I agree it would be a mistake to charge for things that are currently core to how people first engage, especially given how many people first get involved in their 20s when finances are tight.
I think the case for a supporter membership model rests on keeping those core engagement paths free (intro courses, certain events, 1-1 advice, etc.), while offering membership as an optional way for people to express support, get modest perks, and help fund infrastructure.
I also think the contrast you draw betw...
I've now spoken to ~1,400 people as an advisor with 80,000 Hours, and if there's a quick thing I think is worth more people doing, it's doing a short reflection exercise about one's current situation.
Below are some (cluster of) questions I often ask in an advising call to facilitate this. I'm often surprised by how much purchase one can get simply from this -- noticing one's own motivations, weighing one's personal needs against a yearning for impact, identifying blind spots in current plans that could be triaged and easily addressed, etc...
https://economics.mit.edu/news/assuring-accurate-research-record
A really important paper on how AI speeds up R&D discovery was withdrawn and the PhD student who wrote it is no longer at MIT.
I know that folks in EA often favor donating to more effective things rather than less effective things. With that in mind, I have mixed feelings knowing that many Harvard faculty are donating 10%, and that they are donating to the best funded and most prestigious university in the world.
On the one hand, it is really nice to know that they are willing to put their money where their mouth is when their institution is under attack. I get some warm fuzzy feelings from the idea of defending an education institution against political attacks. On the other hand,...
Some notes about the graphs:
As a group organiser I was wildly miscalibrated about the acceptance rate for EAGs! I spoke to the EAG team, and here are the actual figures:
If that’s peaked your interest, EAG London 2025 applications close soon - apply here!
Jemima
Obvious caveat that if we tell lots of people that the acceptance rate is high, we might attract more people without any context on EA and the rate would go down.
(I've not closely checked the data)
epistemic status: i timeboxed the below to 30 minutes. it's been bubbling for a while, but i haven't spent that much time explicitly thinking about this. i figured it'd be a lot better to share half-baked thoughts than to keep it all in my head — but accordingly, i don't expect to reflectively endorse all of these points later down the line. i think it's probably most useful & accurate to view the below as a slice of my emotions, rather than a developed point of view. i'm not very keen on arguing about any of th...
"why do i find myself less involved in EA?"
You go over more details later and answer other questions like what caused some reactions to some EA-related things, but an interesting thing here is that you are looking for a cause of something that is not.
> it feels like looking at the world through an EA frame blinds myself to things that i actually do care about, and blinds myself to the fact that i'm blinding myself.
I can strongly relate, had the same experience. i think it's due to christian upbringing or some kind of need for external validation. I think many people don't experience that, so I wouldn't say that's an inherently EA thing, it's more about the attitude.
I feel like EAs might be sleeping a bit on digital meetups/conferences.
My impression is that many people prefer in-person events to online ones. But at the same time, a lot of people hate needing to be in the Bay Area / London or having to travel to events.
There was one EAG online during the pandemic (I believe the others were EAGxs), and I had a pretty good experience there. Some downsides, but some strong upsides. It seemed very promising to me.
I'm particularly excited about VR. I have a Quest3, and have been impressed by the experience of chatting to pe...
Similar to "Greenwashing" and "Safetywashing", I've been thinking about "Intellectual Washing."
The pattern works as: "Find someone who seems like an intellectual who somewhat aligns with your position. Then claim you have strong intellectual (and by extension, logical) support for your views."
This is easiest to see in sides that you disagree with.
For example, MAGA gets intellectual cred from "The dark enlightenment" / Curtis Yarvin / Peter Thiel / etc. But I'm sure Trump never listened to any of these people, and was likely barely influenced by them. [1]
Hi...
What can ordinary people do to reduce AI risk? People who don't have expertise in AI research / decision theory / policy / etc.
Some ideas:
The UK offers better access as a conference location for international participants compared to the US or the EU.
I'm being invited to conferences in different parts of the world as a Turkish citizen, and visa processes for the US and the EU have gotten a lot more difficult lately. I'm unable to even get a visa appointment for several European countries, and my appointment for the US visa was scheduled 16 months out. I believe the situation is similar for visa applicants from other countries. The UK currently offers the smoothest process with timelines of only a few weeks. Conference organizers that seek applications from all over the world could choose the UK over other options.