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%.
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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...
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...
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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:
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...
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...
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The authors broadly recommend the following for EAs from low and middle income countries (LMICs):
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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AI startups can be big money-makers, particularly as capabilities scale. The author argues that money is key to AI safety, because money:
The author thinks an...
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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):
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Rob paraphrases Nate’s thoughts on capabilities work and the landscape of AGI organisations. Nate thinks:
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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...
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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 ...
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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:
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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 ...
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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:
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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...
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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...
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Reflections from an organizer of the student organisations Harvard AI Safety Team (HAIST) and MIT AI Alignment (MAIA).
Top things that worked:
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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.)
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The author’s observations from talking to / offering advice to several EA orgs:
They suggest solutions of:
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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.)
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Highlights for ALLFED in 2022 include:
Awesome, thanks for doing this!
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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...
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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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
Thanks, this is great feedback to hear, even if things are closing shop for a while.