Dylan Richardson
Bio
Participation2
Graduate student at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Looking for part-time work.
How others can help me
If you can direct me to any open jobs, internships or entry-level work that you know of, that would be very helpful!
Posts 3
Comments26
I'd love to read a deep-dive into a non-PEPFAR USAID program. This Future Perfect article mentioned a few. But it doesn't even have to be an especially great program, there are probably plenty of examples which don't near the 100-fold improvement over the average charity (or the marginal government expenditure), but are still very respectable nonetheless.
There's in general a bit of knowledge gap in EA on the subject of more typical good-doing endeavors. Everyone knows about PlayPumps and Malaria nets, but what about all the stuff in-between? This likely biases our understanding of non-fungible good-doing.
I second this. Mostly because I have doubts about the 80,000 hours cause area. I love their podcast, but I suspect they get a bit shielded from criticism in a way other cause areas aren't by virtue of being such a core EA organization. A more extensive and critical inquiry into "replaceability" would be welcome, whatever the conclusion.
A much of the debate on this topic comes down to questions about risk-aversion and the relevant psychology and decision theory thereof, ex: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vnsoy47psQ5KaeHhB/difference-making-risk-aversion-an-exploration
Although there are other considerations of course.
There would have to (at the very least) be a worse counterfactual here, where they have a hard time finding a replacement and I don't see that happening. I worked in the restaurant industry for a time during undergrad, despite animal welfare concerns. If anything, this was an improvement, since I used the meal discounts to purchase meat-free food. I think this fits analogously, you just have paychecks and a resume builder instead of a meal discount.
It has been my impression that the general AI safety community had over time shifted somewhat against an US-China AI race dynamic being a concern. But with the recent success of DeepSeek, it seems to me that the race is back on.
Has anyone not updated accordingly? If so, why? One implication of this development would seem to be that a merely domestic AI Pause is no longer a good idea. Is there agreement on this?
I'm still a bit confused - that's a lot of books, especially since they are all in Russian! And 18k hardcover! I'm a bit more credulous about the impact of such an effort than others - actual insight in the books is less important than having a fun attraction to adjacent ideas. It's worked before: the growth of less wrong may be partly attributable to this and analogously some films, eg The China Syndrome, film/sci-fi novel nuclear doom conceptions may have had significant impact in molding the attitudes of the public.
But still that's a lot of books! And if I understand correctly, with no connection to the ones which were (or weren't?) successfully distributed by the 28k in grant money, before the project ended.
Why so many? What fraction of original copies made have been successfully distributed? I understand that this wasn't from grant money, I'm just curious about the story here is all.
Edit: saw this. So apparently 68k originally. Wow!
I didn't realize it before until I read: "6. Promoting some good Forum content on other platforms", but it strikes me that there seems to be a strange lack of forum content shared elsewhere, even in other EA circles.
I don't think it content quality that is the problem (though lots of good stuff here is link-posted from elsewhere), my inclination is that content presentation just isn't amenable to sharing.
Other platforms remind you at every turn to share content, subscribe, follow, etc. The forum doesn't. Plus, maybe people aren't sharing because it doesn't have pretty pictures? Basically the norm for Substacks now is to include a nice picture at the top, even if it's just a vaguely relevant AI-generation. Substack strongly encourages writers to do this!
Great news!
I'm curious though if there has been any work done on the welfare math of this? Frankenchickens suffer more individually due to their size, but greater size also means less individual chickens are needed to satisfy demand. Furthermore, faster growth means less time spent alive and, presumably, suffering - or maybe more time, if slaughter makes up a large fraction of it?
It seems likely to me that Frankenchickens do entail more suffering and that banning them would mean less regardless, as increasing cost of production also lowers demand; plus the campaign is a good movement building endeavor. However, it would still be good to understand how much of priority this is relative to other policy changes.
I actually like that you did this; there's such little information on the news "firehose" right now that a possible accuracy/content tradeoff is entirely reasonable!