All of Zoe Williams's Comments + Replies

Thanks, this is great feedback to hear, even if things are closing shop for a while.

Thanks! And good call, sorry for missing that one - added it into the post :-)

Looks like YouGov had the same concern and ran a second poll where they split respondents into three groups for that question (one with no framing, one with the support framing from the post above, and one with a support + oppose framing):
https://today.yougov.com/topics/technology/articles-reports/2023/04/15/ai-nuclear-weapons-world-war-humanity-poll

The simple / no context framing ("Would you support or oppose a six-month pause on some kinds of AI development?") got the lowest support, but still pretty high at 58%.

3
Linch
1y
YouGov summarizes it as  Which sounds right to me, especially for total support (58%/61%/60% for no framing, support, support+oppose respectively).

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Argues that statements by large language models that seem to report their internal life (eg. ‘I feel scared because I don’t know what to do’), isn't straightforward evidence either for or against the sentience of that model. As an analogy, parrots are probably sentient and very likely feel pain. But when they say ‘I feel pain’, that doesn’t mean they are in pain.


It might be possible to train systems to more accurately report if they are sentient, via removing any other incentives for saying conscious-sounding thin... (read more)

1
rgb
1y
I like it! I think one thing the post itself could have been clearer on is that reports could be indirect evidence for sentience, in that they are evidence of certain capabilities that are themselves evidence of sentience. To give an example (though it’s still abstract), the ability of LLMs to fluently mimic human speech —> evidence for capability C—> evidence for sentience. You can imagine the same thing for parrots: ability to say “I’m in pain”—> evidence of learning and memory —> evidence of sentience. But what they aren’t are reports of sentience. so maybe at the beginning: aren’t “strong evidence” or “straightforward evidence”

Interesting question, thanks for adding this! I don't have any background in animal welfare research or the plant/cell based meat area beyond reading & chatting with people, but popped some thoughts below regardless:

My leaning would be that having both is better than just one, to provide increased choice and options to move away from traditional meats. I'm not sure I buy the fourth point - while there will be some competition between plant-based and cell-based meat, they also both compete with the currently much larger traditional meat market, and I th... (read more)

1
Madhav Malhotra
1y
"I'm not sure I buy the fourth point - while there will be some competition between plant-based and cell-based meat, they also both compete with the currently much larger traditional meat market, and I think there are some consumers who would eat plant-based but not cell-based and vice versa." * How confident are you in your reasoning here?  * What kind of empirical evidence do you think would disprove/prove this argument?  The evidence I've seen (Source) suggests that consumers are largely confused about the difference between cell-based and lab-based meats, which doesn't help sales of either. Also, cell-based meats are currently HORRIBLE for animal rights given the amount of suffering they cause to cow fetuses (Source). If consumers started conflating the issues with cell-based meats and plant-based meats, it would be a large setback to the industry. And given how largely the traditional dairy market has been lobbying against plant-based milks (Source), I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that they might intentionally blur the lines between cell-based and plant-based meats to find whatever arguments they can against alternative meats. 

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
In November 2022, Open Philanthropy (OP) announced a soft pause on new longtermist funding commitments, while they re-evaluated their bar for funding. This is now lifted and a new bar set.

The process for setting the new bar was:

  1. Rank past grants by both OP and now-defunct FTX-associated funders, and divide these into tiers.
  2. Under the assumption of 30-50% of OP’s funding going to longtermist causes, estimate the annual spending needed to exhaust these funds in 20-50 years.
  3. Play around with what grants would have
... (read more)

Summary of this post (feel free to suggest edits!):
Pax Fauna recently completed an 18-month study on messaging around accelerating away from animal farming in the US. The study involved literature reviews, interviews with meat eaters, and focus groups and online surveys to test messaging.

They found that most advocacy focuses on the animal, human health, and environmental harms of animal farming. However the biggest barrier to action for many people tended to be “futility” - the feeling that their actions didn’t matter, because even if they changed, th... (read more)

2
Aidan Kankyoku
1y
Looks great! And to be nitpicky here's an alternative third paragraph: Based on this, they suggest reframing messaging to focus on how we as a society / species are always evolving and progressive forwards, and that evolving beyond animal farming is something we can do, should do, and already are doing. They also suggest refocusing strategy around this - eg. focusing on advocacy for pro-animal policies, as opposed to asking consumers to make individual changes to their food choices.

Great read, thanks for posting! A quick heads up that many of the links in the table of contents are broken (either linking to start of post, or to non-existent websites).

Summary of this post, and the sequel post Technological Bottlenecks for PCR, LAMP, and Metagenomics Sequencing (feel free to suggest edits!)
Biosurveillance systems help early identification of pathogens that could cause pandemics. The authors weighted existing methods on 10 criteria including usefulness, quality of evidence, feasibility and potential risks.


High scoring methods included: P... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The authors broadly recommend the following for EAs from low and middle income countries (LMICs):

  • Build career capital early on
  • Work on global issues over local ones, unless clear reasons for the latter
  • Some individuals to do local versions of: community building, priorities research, charity-related activities, or career advising

They discuss pros, cons, and concrete next steps for each. Individuals can use the scale / neglectedness / tractability framework, marginal value, and personal fit to assess options. They su... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research (CEEALAR) is an EA hotel that provides grants in the form of food and accommodation on-site in Blackpool, UK. They have lots of space and encourage applications from those wishing to learn or work on research or charitable projects in any cause area. This includes study and upskilling with the intent to move into those areas.

Since opening 4.5 years ago, they’ve supported ~100 EAs with their career development, and hosted another ~200 visitors for events / networki... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The author argues that “the crypto industry as a whole has significant problems with speculative bubbles, ponzis, scams, frauds, hacks, and general incompetence”, and that EA orgs should avoid being significantly associated with it until the industry becomes stable.

In the last year, at least 4 crypto firms collapsed, excluding FTX. Previous downturns have included the collapse of the largest at the time crypto exchange mt gox. Crypto’s use is dominated by people using it to get rich - after 14 years, there are alm... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
r.i.c.e collaborates with the Government of Uttar Pradesh and an organization in India to promote Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC), which is a well-established tool for increasing survival rates of low birth weight babies. They developed a public-private partnership to cause the government’s KMC guidelines to be implemented cost-effectively in a public hospital.

Their best estimate based on a combination of implementation costs and pre-existing research is that it costs ~$1.8K per life saved. However they are unsure... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Smallpox was confirmed as eradicated on December 9th, 1979. Our World in Data has a great explorer on its history and how eradication was achieved.

Smallpox killed ~300 million people in the 20th century alone, and is the only human disease to have been completely eradicated. It also led to the first ever vaccine, after Edward Jenner demonstrated that exposure to cowpox - a related but less severe disease - protected against smallpox. In the 19th and 20th centuries, further improvements were made to the vaccin... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Some interventions are neglected because they have less emotional appeal. EA typically tackles this by redirecting more resources there. The authors suggest we should also tackle the cause, by designing marketing to make them more emotionally appealing. This could generate significant funding, more EA members, and faster engagement.

As an example, the Make-A-Wish website presents specific anecdotes about a sick child, while the Against Malaria Foundation website focuses on statistics. Psychology shows the... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
AI startups can be big money-makers, particularly as capabilities scale. The author argues that money is key to AI safety, because money:

  • Can convert into talent (eg. via funding AI safety industry labs, offering compute to safety researchers, and funding competitions, grants, and fellowships). Doubly so if the bottleneck becomes engineering talent and datasets instead of creative researchers.
  • Can convert into influence (eg. lobbying, buying board seats, soft power).
  • Is flexible and always useful.

The author thinks an... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
SoGive is an EA-aligned research organization and think tank. In 2022, they ran a pilot grants program, granting £223k to 6 projects (out of 26 initial applicants):

  • Founders Pledge - £93,000 - to hire an additional climate researcher.
  • Effective Institutions Project - £62,000 - for a regranting program.
  • Doebem - £35,000 - a Brazillian effective giving platform, to continue scaling.
  • Jack Davies - £30,000 - for research improving methods to scan for neglected X-risks.
  • Paul Ingram - £21,000 - poll how nuclear winter info a
... (read more)

Thanks, and that makes sense, edited to reflect your suggestion

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Rob paraphrases Nate’s thoughts on capabilities work and the landscape of AGI organisations. Nate thinks: 

  1. Capabilities work is a bad idea, because it isn’t needed for alignment to progress and it could speed up timelines. We already have many ML systems to study, which our understanding lags behind. Publishing that work is even worse.
  2. He appreciates OpenAI’s charter, openness to talk to EAs / rationalists, clearer alignment effort than FAIR or Google Brain, and transparency about their plans. He considers
... (read more)
4
RobBensinger
1y
Thanks, Zoe! This is great. :) Points 1 and 2 of your summary are spot-on. Point 3 is a bit too compressed:  "This applies to all of OpenAI, DeepMind, FAIR, Google Brain" makes it sound like "this organization does well for the reference class 'AI capabilities org'" applies to all four orgs; whereas actually we think OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic are doing well for that class, and FAIR and Google Brain are not. "Even if an organisation does well for the reference class 'AI capabilities org', it’s better for it to stop" also makes it sound like Nate endorses this as true for all possible capabilities orgs in all contexts. Rather, Nate thinks it could be good to do capabilities work in some contexts; it just isn't good right now. The intended point is more like: OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind are unusually safety-conscious AI capabilities orgs (e.g., much better than FAIR or Google Brain). But reality doesn't grade on a curve, there's still a lot to improve, and they should still call a halt to mainstream SotA-advancing potentially-AGI-relevant ML work, since the timeline-shortening harms currently outweigh the benefits.

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The author asks whether EA aims to be a question about doing good effectively, or a community based around ideology. In their experience, it has mainly been the latter, but many EAs have expressed they’d prefer it be the former.

They argue the best concrete step toward EA as a question would be to collaborate more with people outside the EA community, without attempting to bring them into the community. This includes policymakers on local and national levels, people with years of expertise in the fie... (read more)

1
Siobhan_M
1y
This is a great summary, thank you so much!
1
NickLaing
1y
Nice one Zoe love these a lot

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Some suffering is bad enough that non-existence is preferable. The lock-in of uncompassionate systems (eg. through AI or AI-assisted governments) could cause mass suffering in the future.

OPIS (Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering) has until now worked on projects to help ensure that people in severe pain can get access to effective medications. In future, they plan to “address the very principles of governance, ensure that all significant causes of intense suffering receive adequate attention, and ... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
CEA follows a fidelity model of spreading ideas, which claims because EA ideas are nuanced and the media often isn’t, media communication should only be done by those qualified who are confident the media will report the ideas exactly as stated.

The author argues against this on four points:

  1. Sometimes many people doing something ‘close to’ is better than few doing it ‘exactly’ eg. few vegans vs. many reductitarians.
  2. If you don’t actively engage the media, a large portion of coverage will be from detractors, and there
... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Since Sandra Malagón and Laura González were funded to work on growing the Spanish-speaking EA community, it’s taken off. There have been 40 introductory fellowships, 2 university groups started, 2 camps, many dedicated community leaders, translation projects, 7-fold activity on Slack vs. 2020, and a community fellowship / new hub in Mexico City. If you’re keen to join in, the slack workspace is here, and anyone (English or Spanish speaking) can apply to EAGxLatAm.

(If you'd like to see more summaries of ... (read more)

4
Jaime Sevilla
1y
Sounds great, thank you Zoe!

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Wealthy countries spend a collective $178B on development aid per year - 25% of all giving worldwide. Some aid projects have been cost-effective on a level with Givewell’s top recommendations (eg. PEPFAR), while others have caused outright harm.

Aid is usually distributed via a several step process:

  1. Decide to spend money on aid. Many countries signed a 1970 UN resolution to spend 0.7% of GNI on official development assistance.
  2. Government decides a general strategy / principles.
  3. Government passes a budget, assigni
... (read more)
1
Jacob Wood
1y
Zoe, this summary looks pretty good to us! The only change I would suggest is changing "grassroots EA campaign in Switzerland redirected funding" to "grassroots EA campaign in Switzerland increased funding", as the result of the campaign was an increase to the overall development cooperation budget in Zurich. Thanks!

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The US poverty threshold, below which one qualifies for government assistance, is $6625 per person for a family of four. In Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, the median income is a twelfth of that (adjusted for purchasing power). Without a change in growth rates, it will take Malawi almost two centuries to catch up to where the US is today.

This example illustrates the development gap: the difference in living standards between high and low income countries. Working on this is important both for the wel... (read more)

Good to know, cheers - will update in the summary posts and emails to include all authors.

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The Founders Pledge Climate Fund has run for 2 years and distributed over $10M USD. 

Because the climate-space has ~$1T per year committed globally, the team believes the best use of marginal donations is to correct existing biases of overall climate philanthropy, fill blindspots and leverage existing attention on climate. The Fund can achieve this more effectively than individual donations because it can make large grants to allow grantees to start new programs, quickly respond to time-sensitive opportun... (read more)

2
jackva
1y
Thanks for doing this! I think this is mostly right, three suggestions for minor edits: 1. The CATF example is more of an example of this mechanism (shifting the trajectory of organizations), not itself the major result of the Climate Fund (as the trajectory of CATF was shifted before, in 2018, through FP highlighting before the Fund existed). The primary organizations we are replicating this with the fund so far are TerraPraxis and Future Cleantech Architects, both of which we were the initial philanthropic investors and that have since gone on to grow quite significantly. 2. "Future work will look at where best to focus policy efforts, and the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on possible policy windows." > "...advocacy efforts given major changes in policy windows in the US and globally as well as profound changes in energy through the Russo-Ukrainian war" -- or similar, I think mostly avoiding a formulation that suggests we are just opportunistically exploiting policy windows from the war, it is more about updating the landscaping analysis given massive changes. This is all quite in the weeds, so if those edits don't make sense, feel free to ignore them! Thanks again for including the post.  

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Reflections from an organizer of the student organisations Harvard AI Safety Team (HAIST) and MIT AI Alignment (MAIA).

Top things that worked:

  • Outreach focusing on technically interesting parts of alignment and leveraging informal connections with networks and friend groups.
  • HAIST office space, which was well-located and useful for programs and coworking.
  • Leadership and facilitators having had direct experience with AI safety research.
  • High-quality, scalable weekly reading groups.
  • Significant time expenditure,
... (read more)
1
Xander123
1y
Thanks for this! Want to note that this was co-authored by 7 other people (the names weren't transferred when it was crossposted from LW).

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):

Funds allow donors to give as a community, with expert grantmakers and evaluators directing funds as cost-effectively as possible. Advantages include that the fund can learn how much funding an organization needs, provide it when they need it, monitor how it’s used, and incentivize them to be even more impactful. It also provides a reliable source of funding and support for those organisations.


GWWC recommends most donors give to funds, with the exception of those who have unique donation opportunities that funds c... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
A recent study (Bressler, 2021) estimated that for every 4000 ton CO2 emitted today, there will be one extra premature human death before 2100. The post author converts this into human deaths per kilogram of meat produced (based on CO2 emissions for that species), and pairs this with the number of animals of that species that need to be slaughtered to produce 1kg of meat. 

After weighting by neurons per animal, their key findings are below:

This suggests switching from beef to chicken or insect meat reduces cli... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Linkpost to an article by Rohit Krishnan, a former hedge fund manager. Haydn highlights key excerpts, including one claiming that “This isn’t Enron, where you had extremely smart folk hide beautifully constructed fictions in their publicly released financial statements. This is Dumb Enron, where someone “trust me bro”-ed their way to a $32 Billion valuation.”

They mention that “the list of investors in FTX [was] a who’s who of the investing world” and while “VCs don’t really do forensic accounting” there were ... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Linkpost and key excerpts from a New Yorker article overviewing how EA has reacted to SBF and the FTX collapse. The article claims there was an internal slack channel of EA leaders where a warning that SBF “has a reputation [in some circles] as someone who regularly breaks laws to make money” was shared, before the collapse.

(If you'd like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The author’s observations from talking to / offering advice to several EA orgs:

  • Many orgs skew heavily junior, and most managers and managers-of-managers are in that role for the first time.
  • Many leaders are isolated (no peers to check in with) and / or reluctant (would prefer not to do people management).

They suggest solutions of:

  • Creating an EA manager's slack (let them know if you’re interested!)
  • Non-EA management/leadership coaches - they haven't found most questions they get in their coaching are EA-specific.
  • More
... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
There is a paid opportunity to be part of a Malaria vaccine trial in Baltimore from January to early March. The vaccine has a solid chance of being deployed for pregnant women if it passes this challenge trial. It’s ~55 hours time commitment if in Baltimore or more if needing to travel, and the risk of serious complications is very low. The author signed up, and knows 6 others who have expressed serious interest. Get in touch with questions or to join an AirBnB the author is setting up for it.

(If you'd like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Highlights for ALLFED in 2022 include:

  • Submitted 4 papers to peer review (some now published)
  • Started to develop country-level preparedness and response plans for Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenarios (US plan completed).
  • Worked on financial mechanisms for food system interventions, including superpests, climate food finance nexus, and pandemic preparedness. 
  • Delivered briefings to several NATO governments and UN agencies on global food security, nuclear winter impacts, policy considerations and resilience options.
... (read more)

Awesome, thanks for doing this!

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits):
Around 250 people on the UK kidney waiting list die each year. Donating your kidney via the UK Living Kidney Sharing Scheme can potentially kick off altruistic chains of donor-recipient pairs ie. multiple donations. Donor and recipient details are kept confidential.

The process is ~12-18 months and involves consultations, tests, surgery, and for the author 3 days of hospital recovery. In a week since discharge, most problems have cleared up, they can slowly walk several miles, and they... (read more)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Differing values creates risks of uncooperative behavior within the EA community, such as failing to update on good arguments because they come from the “other side”, failing to achieve common moral aims (eg. avoiding worst case outcomes), failing to compromise, or committing harmful acts out of spite / tribalism.

The author suggests mitigating these risks by assuming good intent, looking for positive-sum compromises, actively noticing and reducing our tendency to promote / like our ingroup more, and validating tha... (read more)

Ah cheers, that makes sense - I'll update in the forum summary post too.

Great to hear, and thanks for the clarification.

Ah yep, good idea - I'll do that for next week's :)

Awesome, glad to hear :-)

Ah good point - that's one I decided partway not to summarize but forgot to move it out of the section.

Thanks for the feedback!

having this available as a podcast (read by a human) would be cool

That would be awesome - I don't have time to make one myself, but if anyone else wants to take the post and make it into something like that feel free.

this sentence is confusing to me: "Due to this, he concludes the cause area is one of the most important LT problems and primarily advises focusing on other risks due to neglectedness." - is it missing a "not"?

Good point - I've re-read the conclusion and changed that line to be a bit clearer. It now reads:  "Due to... (read more)

It’s a good point, there’s often cases for discounting in a lot of decisions where we’re weighing up value. It’s usually done for two reasons – one being uncertainty, so we’re less certain of stuff in the future and therefore our actions might not do what we expect or the reward we’re hoping for might not actually happen. And the second being only relevant to financial stuff, but given inflation – and that you’re likely to have more income the older you are - the money’s real value is more now than later. 

The second reason doesn’t really apply here be... (read more)

1
james
2y
Thanks for your submission!

What type of arts do you enjoy? For instance, I always really enjoyed English and drama, and am now in a data science job where I am going to be writing up publications and doing talks in addition to my coding/stats work. If you go for a small or start-up company, you can often have a broader job like this where you can take on tasks that interest you - my perception is that larger companies tend to have more regimented roles.

If you're more into visual arts, web design, marketing or some sort of community-building/social logistics could be good options. They'd also provide good skills in short supply to volunteer to the EA community.

0
Eli_Gaal
9y
Thanks. English and drama and visual arts are all things I like, so I'll look into these things you've said.

I see the hero as the one pushing innovative new strategies for world-changing (eg. starting a business in that area, like Givewell - specifics subject to what changes the hero wants to make), while the sidekicks are the ones that help out by being employed in that business (in a non-directing role) or donating to it or providing moral support etc. - they help what's already been created do better, and thus have to choose from people/causes that already exist rather than creating their own.

0
Tom_Ash
9y
What would examples of new such strategies and businesses be?
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