I would be excited about a common application. My sense is that the only reason it doesn't exist is that no one has put the time in to create it;  when I've talked to hiring managers, most were in favor of the project (though there are some concerns, e.g. the fact that applications are currently a costly signal is helpful for identifying the applicants who actually really want to apply).

Thanks for organizing the conference, the statement, and the resulting media coverage! Cool to see big names like Chalmers on the list.

I do not remember being entirely or even primarily motivated by that issue. I'm not sure where Matt is getting this from, though in his defense he's writing pretty flippantly.  

Animal Justice Appreciation Note

Animal Justice et al. v A.G of Ontario 2024 was recently decided and struck down large portions of Ontario's ag-gag law. A blog post is here. The suit was partially funded by ACE, which presumably means that many of the people reading this deserve partial credit for donating to support it.

Thanks to Animal Justice (Andrea Gonsalves, Fredrick Schumann, Kaitlyn Mitchell, Scott Tinney), co-applicants Jessica Scott-Reid and Louise Jorgensen, and everyone who supported this work!

Thanks! That's helpful. In particular, I wasn't tracking the 2021 versus 2022 thing.

predicting a 10% annual risk of FTX collapsing with FTX investors and the Future Fund (though not customers) losing all of their money,

Do you know if this person made any money off of this prediction? I know that shorting cryptocurrency is challenging, and maybe the annual fee from taking the short side of a perpetual future would be larger than 10%, not sure, but surely once the FTX balance sheet started circulating that should have increased the odds that the collapse would happen on a short time scale enough for this trade to be profitable?^[1]

They perhaps shouldn't be interviewed on popular EA podcasts like 80,000 Hours (as far as I can tell Moskovitz or Tuna have never been on)

I personally would be pretty interested to hear an interview with Moskovitz, Tuna, or Buterin and would feel sad if 80k felt prohibited from talking to them. I don't remember being that excited about Buterin's 2019 interview (I recall it mostly being about block chain stuff which I wasn't that interested in), so I guess that's some sign that prohibiting interviews with him wouldn't cost that much, but I'm interested to hear some of his answers to these questions.

I do expect on priors that there is a decent chance that Buterin will be revealed to have committed some type of serious misconduct, and if that does happen I wouldn't be surprised to see a headline like "yet another EA billionaire is a criminal." A blanket prohibition on inviting him to the 80k podcast feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water though.

A thing that would update me here is evidence that engagement with a community/set of ideas by billionaires is on expectation negative. My sense is that EA's involvement with SBF was toward the tail of the distribution of how bad engagement with billionaires goes, but I could be wrong about that, and if it is closer to the median case then a blanket prohibition feels more warranted.

Thanks! I appreciate the concrete suggestions.

Thanks for writing this! I would find it helpful if you taboo'd EA should. e.g. "Specific recommendation: don’t allow a billionaire to become a ‘face’ of EA" - what specifically should have been done differently?

E.g. My recollection from Going Infinite is that the billboards you criticize weren't even endorsed by Sam, they were done by some marketing agency who was summarily fired after Sam realized what they had done. And, like you say, they didn't contain the phrase "effective altruism" or something where anyone could plausibly be said to have a trademark. So what mechanism are you imagining which could have prevented them from going up?

I think there are steps which could be taken to limit people's ability to identify as EAs. For example: CEA could exercise authoritarian control over the effective altruism trademark and sue anyone who self describes as an EA without jumping through whatever hoops we put in place. I think this is not a crazy idea, but it has clear downsides, and I'm not sure if this is actually what you are suggesting.

Yes, I responded to it here