Quick takes

Counting people is hard. Here are some readings I've come across recently on this, collected in one place for my own edification: 

1. Oliver Kim's How Much Should We Trust Developing Country GDP? is full of sobering quotes. Here's one: "Hollowed out by years of state neglect, African statistical agencies are now often unable to conduct basic survey and sampling work... [e.g.] population figures [are] extrapolated from censuses that are decades-old". The GDP anecdotes are even more heartbreaking
2. Have we vastly underestimated the total number of people on E

I think it would be really useful for there to be more public clarification on the relationship between effective altruism and Open Philanthropy. 

My impression is that:
1. OP is the large majority funder of most EA activity. 
2. Many EAs assume that OP is a highly EA organization, including the top.
3. OP really tries to explicitly not take responsibility for EA and does not claim to themselves be highly EA.
4. EAs somewhat assume that OP leaders are partially accountable to the EA community, but OP leaders would mostly disagree. 
5. From the poi... (read more)

I want to see a bargain solver for AI alignment to groups: a technical solution that would allow AI systems to solve the pie cutting problem for groups and get them the most of what they want, for AI alignment. The best solutions I've seen for maximizing long run value involve using a bargain solver to decide what ASI does, which preserves the richness and cardinality of people's value functions and gives everyone as much of what they want as possible, weighted by importance. (See WWOTF Afterwards, the small literature on bargaining-theoretic approaches to... (read more)

I want to see more discussion on how EA can better diversify and have strategically-chosen distance from OP/GV.

One reason is that it seems like multiple people at OP/GV have basically said that they want this (or at least, many of the key aspects of this). 

A big challenge is that it seems very awkward for someone to talk and work on this issue, if one is employed under the OP/GV umbrella. This is a pretty clear conflict of interest. CEA is currently the main organization for "EA", but I believe CEA is majority funded by OP, with several other clear st... (read more)

I really liked several of the past debate weeks, but I find it quite strange and plausibly counterproductive to spend a week in a public forum discussing these questions.

There is no clear upside to reducing the uncertainty on this question, because there are few interventions that are predictably differentiated along those lines.

And there is a lot of communicative downside risk when publicly discussing trading off extinction versus other risks / foregone benefits, apart from appearing out of touch with > 95% of people trying to do good in the world ("a... (read more)

The World Happiness Report 2025 is out!

Finland leads the world in happiness for the eighth year in a row, with Finns reporting an average score of 7.736 (out of 10) when asked to evaluate their lives.

Costa Rica (6th) and Mexico (10th) both enter the top 10 for the first time, while continued upward trends for countries such as Lithuania (16th), Slovenia (19th) and Czechia (20th) underline the convergence of happiness levels between Eastern, Central and Western Europe.

The United States (24th) falls to its lowest-ever position, with the United Kingdom (23rd)

Has the past two months seen more harm done (edit: by the new administration) than the totality of good EA has done since it's existence? 

I realized that the concept of utility as a uniform, singular value is pretty off-putting to me. I consider myself someone who is inherently aesthetic and needs to place myself in a broader context of the society, style and so on. I require a lot of experiences— in some way, I need more than just happiness to reach a state of fulfillment. I need to have aesthetic experience of beauty, the experience of calmness, the anxiety of looking for answers, the joy of building and designing. 

The richness of everyday experience might be reducible to two dimensions: positive and negative feelings but this really doesn't capture what a fulfilling human life is. 

Giving now vs giving later, in practice, is a thorny tradeoff. I think these add up to roughly equal considerations, so my currently preferred policy is to split my donations 50-50, i.e. give 5% of my income away this year and save/invest 5% for a bigger donation later. (None of this is financial/tax advice! Please do your own thinking too.)

In favor of giving now (including giving a constant share of your income every year/quarter/etc, or giving a bunch of your savings away soon):

• Simplicity.
• The effects of your donation might have compounding returns, e.g.

I would like to publicly set a goal not to comment other people's posts with a criticism of some minor side point that doesn't matter. I have a habit of doing that, but I think it's usually more annoying than it is helpful so I would like to stop. If you see me doing it, feel free to call me out

(I reserve the right to make substantive criticisms of a post's central arguments)

Random thought: does the idea of explosive takeoff of intelligence assume the alignment is solvable?

If the alignment problem isn’t solvable, then an AGI, in creating ASI, would face the same dilemma as humans: The ASI wouldn’t necessarily have the same goals, would disempower the AGI, instrumental convergence, all the usual stuff.

I suppose one counter argument is that the AGI rationally shoudn’t create ASI, for these reasons, but, similar to humans, might do so anyway due to competitive/racing dynamics. Whichever AGI doesn’t creates ASI will be left behind, etc.

I've been trying to process the conversation in this thread:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mopsmd3JELJRyTTty/ozzie-gooen-s-shortform?commentId=o9rEBRmKoTvjNMHF7

One thing that comes to mind is that this seems like a topic a lot of people care about, and there's a lot of upvotes & agreements, but there also seemed to be a surprising lack of comments, overall. 

I've heard from others elsewhere that they were nervous about giving their takes, because it's a sensitive topic. 

Obviously I'm really curious about what, if anything, could be ... (read more)

Clarifying "Extinction"

I expect this debate week to get tripped up a lot by the term “extinction”. So here I’m going to distinguish:

• Human extinction — the population of Homo sapiens, or members of the human lineage (including descendant species, post-humans, and human uploads), goes to 0.
• Total extinction — the population of Earth-originating intelligent life goes to 0.

Human extinction doesn’t entail total extinction. Human extinction is compatible with: (i) AI taking over and creating a civilisation for as long as it can; (ii) non-human biological li... (read more)