Maybe you’re referring to this - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/56CHyqoZskFejWgae/ea-is-a-global-community-but-should-it-be?
Hmm I’d very keen to see what an answer to this might look like. I know some people I work with are interested in making a similar kind of switch.
It might be helpful to also think of China's compute access in a world where they invade Taiwan. I don't think this should be weighed highly IMO but still seems personally useful to work through.
i’d recommend reading the following for people interested by this - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/illusion-chinas-ai-prowess-regulation
Thanks for asking Yadav. I can confirm that:
Hmm I disagree. I’m not a fan of making it a norm for someone to reply to me, feels icky and I don’t think anyone has responsibility to message me back unless we’ve scheduled something beforehand.
I empathise with the awkwardness of trying to reach out again but something like ‘Hey I tried reaching you at EAG: London, but didn’t get a response. No pressure but if you’d have time at this EAGx to have a chat I’d love to. Some things I’d like to get out of our conversation: X, Y, Z….’ could be reasonable way of dealing with this.
Small note - it seems to occasionally mess up the usernames for posts like 'EU farmed fish policy reform roadmap' and 'New probabilistic simulation tool'.
I'm doing some thinking on the prospects for international cooperation on AI safety, particularly potential agreements to slow down risky AI progress like CHARTS. Does anyone know of a good website or resource that summarizes different countries' current views and policies regarding deliberately slowing AI progress? For example, something laying out which governments seem open to restrictive policies or agreements to constrain the development of advanced AI (like the EU?) versus which ones want to charge full steam ahead, no matter the risks. Or which coun...
I wonder if anyone has examined the pros and cons of protesting against AI labs? I have seen a lot of people uncertain about this. It may be useful to have someone have a post up, having done maybe <10 hours of thinking on this.
Suggestion: Enlarge the font size for pronouns on EA Global/EA retreat name cards
There was a period when I used they/them pronouns and was frequently misgendered at EA events. This likely occurred because I present as male, but regardless, it was a frustrating experience. I often find it difficult to correct people and explicitly mention my preferred pronouns, especially in socially taxing environments like EAGs or retreats. Increasing the size of the pronouns on name cards could be helpful.
Although I think this is incredible, there is a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that it may be difficult to sustain the kind of success rate that CE is currently achieving. Do you anticipate that, as you run more incubation programs, you will see more incubated charities failing or shutting down?
Do you have a sense of whether you will eventually exhaust cost-effective charity ideas as you continue to run more incubation programs?
Thank you for your comment, Yadav.
Regarding success rates, we expect the net impact per charity to generally improve because both our program and outreach have gotten stronger. This improvement could still happen even with the overall success rate of our charities decreasing, with more charities shutting down but more charities having large wins, especially in policy. Over time, we expect some of our charities to shut down, with our general estimate being that one in five will.
Regarding cost-effective ideas, we recognize this as a legitimate concern and so...
Thanks for writing this! This is cool to see.
I may have missed this but do you have a sense of whether this marketing push is leading to more people working on pressing problems that 80k endorses? I am curious if there is a direct correlation between money spent on marketing and people working on these problems.
Shame you couldn't get involved with stuff here in Bristol; I think we could have made more of an effort last year to be more open to folks outside of the University of Bristol - glad you're liking it in Oxford!
Yeah, I concur. I feel like this could have been under a separate tag that we could have hidden instead.
Thanks for engaging with this post, Adrià!
Yup, it's the growth in staff.
I suspect it isn't the number of staff but rather how highly elite and educated the EU body is. Other countries seem to trust their decisions on this ground.
Off-topic but I thought the 'Company', 'Valuation' and 'Severity' columns were too narrow. They're hard to read on mobile.
Hi Ben,
I realised that this probably has something to do with me having the 'Personal' tag turned on. I unticked the section that asks whether you want to have your post on the frontpage before I posted this, so I was confused as to why this appeared on the frontpage anyways.
I was mostly trying to avoid spamming the frontpage, given this isn't very relevant to the forum.
I tried to prevent this from going up on the front page. Unsure why it's showing up anyways; many apologies.
Really excited about the work the Wild Animal Initiative is doing, so I will be donating to them. I'll also be giving to AMF.
Curious about what this implies -
Ah, thanks for sharing! I assume the Carlsmith report is this - https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353?
If companies like OpenAI and Deepmind have safety teams, it seems to me that they anticipate that speeding up AI capabilities can be very bad, so why don't they press the brakes on their capabilities research until we come up with more solutions to alignment?
I don't think using "optics" as a reason to shift away from the Bay is great. Many of the critiques you seem to be gesturing at would still ham away at EA regardless (potentially because it's an easy narrative to pick on or because it's easy to associate the movement's funding with Silicon Valley).
I also think using the association between EA and Oxford Uni seems counterintuitive to me; people seem to often associate Oxford with "elitism".
I also think using the association between EA and Oxford Uni seems counterintuitive to me; people seem to often associate Oxford with "elitism".
Agree with this, and this could be further hurt by focusing too much on the areas with more elite universities on the East Coast (of course I am in favor of recruiting from them to a large extent, but shifting the community is a different question). Right now I think the Silicon Valley and Oxford hubs balance each other out well on this dimension.
One aspect of Silicon Valley culture I really like relative to Eas...
I think it's more that there's a lot of criticism that's really about Silicone Valley culture, and if EA is less centered there, less of that culture will seep in.
Thanks for creating this! I thought it was really useful and easy to read.
Minor point here, but I think phrases like "soldier mindset" and "high-fidelity" could have been hyperlinked to relevant definitions or articles for clarity.
Good post!
I really liked the idea of a rejection doc when I first came across it. I have one with my brother, and it's been super helpful in keeping us motivated.
“ Since 1980, the country’s animal product consumption has been on a downward trend”
Is there a source for this? (I might have missed out on it from the post. )
I think EA Grants is different from EA Funds. EA Grants was discontinued a while back - https://www.effectivealtruism.org/grants
Oh, I get it now. That seems like a misleading summary, given that that program was primarily aimed at EA community infrastructure (which received 66% of the funding), the statistic cited here is only for a single grants round, and one of the five concrete examples listed seems to be a relatively big global poverty grant.
I still expect there to be some skew here, but I would take bets that the actual numbers for EA Grants look substantially less skewed than 1:16.
I note down certain lines my therapist tells after a session. I look over them from time to time. One that's stuck with me is "You don't need everything to fall in place for you to be okay. You don't need everything to fall in place for you to love yourself." These act as good reminders for me when things aren't going so well in my life.
But other than that, I've found reading things like what Luisa has put out to be very useful. For example, someone sent me this essay by a law professor that was super valuable to read.
I've also found sel...
Thanks for writing this! Especially this part:
I strongly recommend you aim to decouple your self-worth from your productivity and impact — to internalise that you have intrinsic worth no matter how productive you are or how much impact you have.
I was lucky to have a therapist who was able to help me internalise this, and I think it has been incredibly valuable in helping me break some of my negative thought patterns and self-deprecating tendencies.
Thanks for writing this!
I broadly agree that starting an EA Chapter isn't very hard. Though your point on the amount of time one may sink into being an organiser might be missing some nuance. In speaking to other uni groups and from personally helping run the Bristol group, if you really want your group to do well it's going to come at some cost to your time. For example, you are going to have to put in effort to get the most out of really promising folks in your university groups with 1-1s; it can often take you some time to figure out how to ...
Has anyone signed up to your intro fellowship after seeing it on Reddit? I am skeptical about marketing an intro fellowship via Reddit but would love to get your thoughts on it.
Touching on the latter - you might find this useful: https://handbook.globalchallengesproject.org/
Hey Kerry!
Good question. I included this disclaimer because to me it seems very hard to define what we exactly mean by an "AI weapon", which makes a complete ban, like the one the BWC has, implausible.
(I am mostly articulating feelings here. I am unsure about what I think should change).
I am somewhat disappointed with the way Manifund has turned out. This isn't to critique the manifund team or that regranting as an idea is bad, but after a few months of excitement and momentum, things have somewhat decelerated. While you get the occasional cool projects, most of the projects on the website don't seem particularly impressive to me. I also feel like some of the regrantors seem slow to move money, but it could be that the previous problem is feeding into this.