Quick takes

Update (January 28): Marco Rubio has now issued a temporary waiver for "humanitarian programs that provide life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance."[1] PEPFAR's funding was recently paused as a result of the recent executive order on foreign aid.[2] (It was previously reauthorized until March 25, 2025.[3]) If not exempted, this would pause PEPFAR's work for three months, effective immediately. Marco Rubio has issued waivers for some forms of aid, including emergency food aid, and has the authority to issue a similar waiver for PEPFAR, allowing it to resume work immediately.[4] Rubio has previously expressed (relatively generic) positive sentiments about PEPFAR on Twitter,[5] and I don't have specific reason to think he's opposed to PEPFAR, as opposed to simply not caring strongly enough to give it a waiver without anyone encouraging him to. I think it is worth considering calling your representatives to suggest that they encourage Rubio to give PEPFAR a waiver, similarly to the waiver he provided to programs giving emergency food aid. I have a lot of uncertainty here — in particular, I'm not sure whether this is likely to persuade Rubio — but I think it is fairly unlikely to make things actively worse. I think the argument in favor of calling is likely stronger for people who are represented by Republicans in Congress; I expect Rubio would care much more about pressure from his own party than about pressure from the Democrats.   1. ^ https://apnews.com/article/trump-foreign-assistance-freeze-684ff394662986eb38e0c84d3e73350b 2. ^ My primary source for this quick take is Kelsey Piper's Twitter thread, as well as the Tweets it quotes and the articles it and the quoted Tweet link to. For a brief discussion of what PEPFAR is, see my previous Quick Take. 3. ^ https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/pepfars-short-term-reauthorization-sets-an-uncertain-course-for-its-long-term-future/ 4. ^ htt

The EU AI Act explicitly mentions "alignment with human intent" as a key focus area in relation to regulation of systemic risks. As far as I know, this is the first time “alignment” has been mentioned by a law, or major regulatory text.  It’s buried in Recital 110, but it’s there. And it also makes research on AI Control relevant:  "International approaches have so far identified the need to pay attention to risks from potential intentional misuse or unintended issues of control relating to alignment with human intent". This means that alignment is now part of the EU’s regulatory vocabulary. But here’s the issue: most AI governance professionals and policymakers still don’t know what it really means, or how your research connects to it. I’m trying to build a space where AI Safety and AI Governance communities can actually talk to each other. If you're curious, I wrote an article about this, aimed at the corporate decision-makers that lack literacy on your area.  Would love any feedback, especially from folks thinking about how alignment ideas can scale into the policy domain. Here is the Substack link (I also posted it on LinkedIn):  https://open.substack.com/pub/katalinahernandez/p/why-should-ai-governance-professionals?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1j2joa My intuition says that this was a push from Future of Life Institute. Thoughts? Did you know about this already?

Is anyone in EA coordinating a response to the PEPFAR pause? Seems like a very high priority thing for US-based EAs to do, and I'm keen to help if so and start something if not.

The Belgian senate votes to add animal welfare to the constitution. It's been a journey. I work for GAIA, a Belgian animal advocacy group that for years has tried to get animal welfare added to the constitution. Today we were present as a supermajority of the senate came out in favor of our proposed constitutional amendment. The relevant section reads: It's a very good day for Belgian animals but I do want to note that: 1. This does not mean an effective shutdown of the meat industry, merely that all future pro-animal welfare laws and lawsuits will have an easier time.  And, 2. It still needs to pass the Chamber of Representatives. If there's interest I will make a full post about it if once it passes the Chamber. EDIT: Translated the linked article on our site into English.

Are you an EU citizen? If so, please sign this citizen’s initiative to phase out factory farms (this is an approved EU citizen’s initiative, so if it gets enough signatures the EU has to respond): stopcrueltystopslaughter.com It also calls for reducing the number of animal farms over time, and introducing more incentives for the production of plant proteins. (If initiatives like these interest you, I occasionally share more of them on my blog) EDIT: If it doesn't work, try again in a couple hours/days. The collection has just started and the site may be overloaded. The deadline is in a year, so no need to worry about running out of time.

While quartz countertop sales grow, millions of people have silicosis from inhaling silica dust: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-023-16295-2 Hundreds of thousands died in the last couple decades from the incurable disease. Australia's the first country to enact a ban: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/14/australia-will-become-the-first-county-to-ban-engineered-stone-bench-tops-will-others-follow

The recently released 2024 Republican platform said they'll repeal the recent White House Executive Order on AI, which many in this community thought is a necessary first step to make future AI progress more safe/secure. This seems bad. From https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24795758/read-the-2024-republican-party-platform.pdf, see bottom of pg 9.

I believe people are substantially underestimating how much the economy contributes to Trump’s support, and being more aware of it would help better protect the democracy of the most powerful country in the world.  In 2020, the US budget deficit more than tripled. This and other (I think much smaller) factors resulted in US real median household income increasing by a completely unprecedented 11.6% in 2020 according to the Congressional Budget Office. Prior to that year, US real median household income under the Trump administration had improved by the 7% it had under the last Obama administration. However, by the end of 2020, US real median household income had increased by 19.3% total during the Trump administration, more than the 17.8% it had increased over all 4 previous presidential terms combined. If this had been accomplished in a way that didn't decrease long run incomes, we would have called it a miracle. Nothing anywhere near this has happened in the 41 years this statistic has been recorded. Caring about the long run impacts of deficits is esoteric. A miracle is what Americans of normal education experienced.  Polling bears this out. While partisans typically care deeply about culture wars, swing voters (who overall switched from voting from Biden to planning to vote for Trump) are concerned about the economy instead.  For the median income data source, see the supplemental data section. After thinking about various sources' methodology for this statistic more than my economics professors have, I believe this is the highest quality source for this statistic.