Quick takes
A year ago, I wrote "It's OK to Have Unhappy Holidays" during a time when I wasn’t feeling great about the season myself. That post inspired someone to host an impromptu Christmas Eve dinner, inviting others on short notice. Over vegan food and wine, six people came together to share their feelings about the holidays, reflect on the past year with gratitude, and enjoy a truly magical evening. It’s a moment I’m deeply thankful for. Perhaps this could inspire you this year—to host a gathering or spontaneously reach out to those nearby for a walk, a drink, or a shared meal.
Ho-ho-ho, Merry-EV-mas everyone. It is once more the season of festive cheer and especially effective charitable donations, which also means that it's time for the long-awaited-by-nobody-return of the 🎄✨🏆 totally-not-serious-worth-no-internet-points-JWS-Forum-Awards 🏆✨🎄, updated for the 2024! Spreading Forum cheer and good vibes instead of nitpicky criticism!!
Best Forum Post I read this year:
Explaining the discrepancies in cost effectiveness ratings: A replication and breakdown of RP's animal welfare cost effectiveness calculations by @titotal&nb...
As a bit of a lurker, let me echo all of this, particularly the appreciation of @Vasco Grilo🔸. I don't always agree with him, but adding some numbers makes every discussion better!
If transformative AI is defined by its societal impact rather than its technical capabilities (i.e. TAI as process not a technology), we already have what is needed. The real question isn't about waiting for GPT-X or capability Y - it's about imagining what happens when current AI is deployed 1000x more widely in just a few years. This presents EXTREMELY different problems to solve from a governance and advocacy perspective.
E.g. 1: compute governance might no longer be a good intervention
E.g. 2: "Pause" can't just be about pausing model development. It should also be about pausing implementation across use cases
Personal reasons why I wished I delayed donations: I started donating 10% of my income about 6 years back when I was making Software Engineer money. Then I delayed my donations when I moved into a direct work path, intending to make up the difference later in life. I don't have any regrets about 'donating right away' back then. But if I could do it all over again with the benefit of hindsight, I would have delayed most of my earlier donations too.
First, I've been surprised by 'necessary expenses'. Most of my health care needs have been in therapy and denta...
Haven't seen anyone mention RAND as a possible best charity for AI stuff and I guess I'd like to throw their hat in the ring or at least invite people to tell me why I'm wrong. My core claims are approximately:
- Influencing the US (federal) government is probably one of the most scalable cost-effective routes for AI safety.
- Think tanks are one of the most cost-effective ways to influence the US government.
- The prestige of the think tank matters for getting into the room/influencing change.
- Rand is among the most prestigious think tank doing AI safety work.
- It's
Yea I have no idea if they actually need money but if they still want to hire more people to the AI team wouldn't it be better to give the money to RAND to hire those policymakers rather than like the Americans for Responsible Innovation - which open phil currently recommends but is much less prestigious and I'm not sure if they are working side by side with legislators. The fact that open phil gave grants but doesn't currently recommend for individual donors makes me think you are right that they don't need money atm but it would be nice to be sure.
According to this article, CEO shooter Luigi Malgione:
really wanted to meet my other founding members and start a community based on ideas like rationalism, Stoicism, and effective altruism
Doesn't look he was part of the EA movement proper (which is very clear about nonviolence), but could EA principles have played a part in his motivations, similarly to SBF?
I personally think people overrate people's stated reasons for extreme behaviour and underrate the material circumstances of their life. In particular, loneliness
As one counterexample, EA is really rare in humans, but does seem more fueled by principles than situations.
(Otoh, if situations make one more susceptible to adopting some principles, is any really the "true cause"? Like plausibly me being abused as a child made me want to reduce suffering more, like this post describes. But it doesn't seem coherent to say that means the principles are overstated ...
We just wanted to transparently share that CEA’s University Groups Team is not running two of our historical programs over the next few months:
- A University Group Organizer Retreat (UGOR), which was usually run over (northern hemisphere) winter break
- Our summer internship, usually run from May - September
We think both programs are relatively valuable, but are less aligned with our current vision (of providing value through helping EA university group organizers run better groups) than some of our alternatives.
We have made this (difficult!) dec...
Thank you for sharing this update! I’m interested in learning more about how you arrived at this decision, as we at EA Netherlands often encounter similar choices. Your insights could be really valuable for us.
Would you mind sharing a bit about your reasoning process?
Thanks again for keeping us informed!
In honor of Pledge Highlight Week, here’s a list of some resources we recommend for people who are considering taking a pledge.
Articles/FAQ related to pledging
Why pledge (even if you already donate)
5 things you’ve got wrong about the Giving What We Can Pledge
Can money buy happiness? A review of the data (newly updated!)
Videos featuring @Luke Freeman 🔸 :
Why make a public giving pledge?
How much to donate to charity: Finding a good standard for giving
Pledgers sharing their experience
“...
I'm going to repeat something that I did about a year ago:
A very small, informal announcement: if you want someone to review your resume and give you some feedback or advice, send me your resume and I'll help. If you would like to do a mock interview, send me a message and we can schedule a video call to practice. If we have never met before, that is okay. I'm happy to help you, even if we are total strangers.
To be clear: this is not a paid service, I'm not trying to drum up business for some kind of a side-hustle, and I'm not going to ask you to subscribe...
I often return to this bit of 80000 Hours' anonymous career advice, about how when you're great at your job, no one's advice is that useful.
...I think in general if you want to accomplish something, or you want to be good at something, or you want something to happen — you want to throw yourself into it, and get really deep into it. Focus on it. Obsess over it. If you don’t, you probably won’t get the result you want. And if you do — you’re going to find that advice from other people often isn’t that useful. By “advice” here I mean talking to people who are
I have a thought on this. It related to the level of effort from the advice giver, and the willingness to understand the recipient's context. Often advice is given with only a few seconds of effort, or with the giver applying a sort of cookie-cutter template to their understanding of the recipient. That is when useless advice comes from. When the giver dedicates some time minutes toward understanding and exploring the receiver's context, toward actually paying attention, then the advice is able to be of much better quality.
This is specifically fresh ...
@Toby Tremlett🔹 and I will host an EA Forum Team office hours / co-working session in EA Gather this Thursday, Dec 19! We'll be in this pod between 2-3 PM UK time (9-10 AM Eastern Time). Feel free to stop by to ask us questions, work on a Forum post, or just co-work alongside us. :)
We may continue hosting these, perhaps for longer slots than just one hour. Let us know in the comments or over DM if you'd like to attend one in the future.
I think that EA outreach can be net positive in a lot of circumstances, but there is one version of it that always makes me cringe. That version is the targeting of really young people (for this quicktake, I will say anyone under 20). This would basically include any high school targeting and most early-stage college targeting. I think I do not like it for two reasons: 1) it feels a bit like targeting the young/naive in a way I wish we would not have to do, given the quality of our ideas, and 2) these folks are typically far from making a real impact, and ...
Can you maybe expand a bit more on why? I found out about EA when I was 23 and I wish I found out about it when I was perhaps 16/17 and perhaps earlier. It's obviously hard to know but I think I would have made better and different choices on career path, study, etc.; so it's advantageous to learn about EA earlier in life despite being far from making direct impact.
I also suspect though correct me if I'm wrong, behind point 1 is an assumption that EA is bad for people's personal welfare. I don't know if this is true.
I note that in some sense I have lost trust that the EA community gives me a clear prioritisation of where to donate.
Some clearer statements:
- I still think GiveWell does great work
- I still generally respect the funding decisions of Open Philanthropy
- I still think this forum has a higher standard than most place
- It is hard to know exactly how high impact animal welfare funding opportunities interact with x-risk ones
- I don't know what the general consensus on the most impactful x-risk funding opportunities are
- I don't really know what orgs do all-considered work o
Makes sense ! I understand the position.
Regarding AI x animals donation opportunities, all of this is pretty new but I know a few. Hive launched a Ai for Animals website, with an upcoming conference: https://www.aiforanimals.org/
I also know about Electric Sheep, which has made a fellowship on the topic : https://electricsheep.teachable.com/
Anthropic's Twitter account was hacked. It's "just" a social media account, but it raises some concerns.
Update: the post has just been deleted. They keep the updates on their status page: https://status.anthropic.com/
Mini EA Forum Update
We now have a unified @mention feature in our editor! You can use it to add links to posts, tags, and users. Thanks so much to @Vlad Sitalo — both for the GitHub PR introducing this feature, and for time and again making useful improvements to our open source codebase. 💜
Thanks! (I slightly object to "the normal markdown syntax", since based on my quick reading neither John Gruber's original markdown spec nor the latest CommonMark spec nor GitHub Flavoured Markdown have footnotes)
Reflections on Two Years at EA Germany
I'm stepping down this week after two years as co-director of EA Germany. While I deeply valued the team and helped build successful structures, I stayed too long when my core values and personal fit no longer aligned.
When I joined EAD, I approached it like the other organisations I’ve worked with, planning on staying 5-10 years to create stability during growth and change. My co-director, Sarah, and I aimed to grow EAD quickly and sustainably. But the FTX collapse hit just as I started in November 2022, and the d...
If someone isn't already doing so, someone should estimate what % of (self-identified?) EAs donate according to our own principles. This would be useful (1) as a heuristic for the extent to which the movement/community/whatever is living up to its own standards, and (1i) assuming the answer is 'decently' it would be useful evidence for PR/publicity/responding to marginal-faith tweets during bouts of criticism.
Looking at the Rethink survey from 2020, they have some info about which causes EAs are giving to but they seem to note that not many people respond ...