Actually, have not the biggest chances for EA to matter come from being early on very big things (corporate campaigns on animal welfare, YIMBY, pandemics, AI)?

To the extent we think there's enough time to be early on something, my first guess would be to look into the still weird and unacknowledged things, and human-health-focused charities don't quite fit my conception of that (but maybe interbrate welfare is?)

you know:

The Economist says that as effective altruism “has become stronger, [it] has become stranger”. I would put it the other way round: it grew stronger because it was willing to be strange

I'd be interested in more of us trying to spell out the cruxes that would make an EA land into something AIM-shaped or near-termist-charity-shaped. For example, you might think "broad timelines, therefore industrial policy around AI adoption in lower-income countries".

Much of this is just rehashing the old debate about systemic vs marginalist interventions, but I think that debate is important and might be worth revisiting given our newfound knowledge of AI and the additional years we've gained for evaluating the track record of EA projects.

To make my small contribution here, I for the most part have been trying to act as a long timelines guy, and that has led me to grant myself the title of "AI uplift consultant" and faff around trying to see where AI adoption is most important and help out with that. 

("doing basically the same thing we've been doing so far" is a very tempting conclusion, and I frequently try to push back when I catch it, especially for my own plans)

You beat me to the linkpost!

I was so happy to stumble upon this paper. It had been a while since I read a piece of global priorities research that I felt could actually end up influencing my priorities.

I'm so extremely glad you wrote this! I recently wrapped up a year-long biosecurity project that started with an absolute barebones product demo on a reply to this post from Tessa Alexanian.

I wasn't planning to work on biosecurity, but at each step of the way it surprised me how, for one of the areas most emphasized by biosecurity prioritization reports (customer screening of DNA orders), at most a handful of people were making it their priority to make progress on it, and many of them on top of a bunch of other demanding high-impact work.  

With Hanna we were able to meet a bunch of important people and get their advice simply because they were so excited that someone was actually working on it.

And even if I might not stick to biosec longer-term (AI enablement at non-technical EA orgs feels currently even more neglected!), it was a wondrous learning experience to be in a fast-moving space with clear priorities. In the span of a year I got to see many other people join the space, and learned a lot about strategy and picking angles of attack from seeing times when they quickly got traction on something we had been chewing at for months.

If you like doing stuff and seeing progress and moving fast I heartily recommend sending an email to Ayushmaan or me (alejoacelas@gmail.com) and we can help you figure out how to get started.

Although I am guilty of this myself -- having dozens of biosecurity blog post ideas and drafts that I haven't managed to post.

Why not link to them in a public gdocs with the [UNFINISHED DRAFTS] in the title? I'm quite sure I wouldn't have posted half the blog posts I have here if I had tried to polish them before releasing them (and many of them still have incomplete sentences and todos for me to edit them!)

Made a first pass of the curriculum! https://docs.google.com/document/d/11E7FOKyCIo0ijKI-9ddCErMQhL8GeMbgFGJ7NEZKtTE/edit?usp=sharing

Would love for anyone here to comment on their favorite readings from there/which specific readings they'd add

I asked Claude about some options, and previous grants they had funded. Here's what I got:

EA Infrastructure Fund:

• Hear This Idea — podcast on pressing problems
• EA mental health program — served ~175 EAs
• Individual salary — prioritization research and community building
• EA Australia — stipend for first paid CEO
• EA Poland — effective fundraising platform

Meta Charity Funders:

• Giving Multiplier — donation matching for effective charities
• High Impact Athletes — athletes fundraising for effective charities
• One individual — coordinating EA submissions to UK consultation
• EA UK, Indonesia, NZ, Philippines — national orgs CEA stopped covering

Manifund: regranting platform, good for small weird asks
 

Also, if someone here has a promising idea and can show that on a short Gdocs you can just ask me for money. I have some, and I can direct you to friends with good judgement who have more.

could you link the blog post as a Google docs here? (could be with access on request if you're feeling shy).

I might do a first pass of the curriculum on my spare time and I'd love to piggyback on someone else's previous thinking.

I'd recommend you spend absolutely zero time polishing it before putting it here if you think that will make it less like that you share it (see my blog for a somewhat brazen embrace of that principle: https://myea.blog)

For another angle on this. What's the characterization of the "truth-seeking" virtue that propels you on the way to becoming Holden Karnofsky (or to becoming as Holden-like as you can).

Seems like a decent intro to the topic, but it's not what I'm interested on.

On a quick skim, they seem to concern themselves with "baseline" virtues, a standard that most utilitarians should follow, derived from simple, common-sense considerations. I'm much more interested on "speculative" or "frontier" virtues. Character traits that, if relentlessly followed, could expose you to a much higher impact ceiling. Some candidates:

• Openess: the scientific revolution and the literature on ideas as non-rival good that drive growth, suggest that some forms of "sharing" could have outisized, possibly persistent effects on the world. What's the shape of the virtue that leads to to seek the most valuable forms of sharing (somewhat related blog post from me)
• Kindness: most of your impact will come from others in your sphere of influence granting you affordances to act on the world. There's habits, that when consistently aplied, make others more enthusiastic about granting you such affordances (Sam Altman and how quickly he responds to emails is an example that comes to mind. You don't have to agree with his values, but I think he's a very good case study for many relational viirtues)
• Integrity: if you're an ambitious consequentialist, you could aim to affect the way our society/civilization conceives the good life (e.g. think of the founding fathers). How important is the integrity of your daily behavior for that? What are the traits you'd like to embody precisely because of their effect on your civilization's character? (somewhat related)

I have some writings on my blog related to some of these. I might come back later to link them here once I'm on my computer.