Do you think Living Goods is well positioned to deal with those practicalities? If not, why not?

FWIW I doubt there are many (any?) EAs that would advocate for reallocating “ all arts funding to top GiveWell charities”. Everything is at the margin!

Nick, thank you for studying this and for sharing your findings. I do think there's probably something to this space.

That said, I think you know probably more than anyone in EA how good people in poverty are at saving money. Don't you think it's unlikely that there is an option available that could save tens of dollars a year, which people are not taking advantage of on their own initiative? I doubt that achieving sufficient capital is the issue (as for example with a tin roof) if we're talking about a $7, or even $2 product.

Maybe another way of framing this is, why do you think that this is a market failure / why do you think the free market is not addressing this on its own?

I would be very curious to know if Living Goods has looked at this; I know that at one point at least they used to sell reusable pads. It seems like an obvious fit to me, and a much lower risk one than distribution for free.

Let us know what you find.

My understanding is that some electric and water utilities did a similar thing in the early days of the pandemic, for the same reasons.

If you are wondering how this change was received by the media, well

• Bloomberg: Anthropic Drops Hallmark Safety Pledge in Race With AI Peers
• The Wall Street Journal: Anthropic Dials Back AI Safety Commitments
• Gizmodo: Anthropic Rolls Back Safety Protocols as It Waits to Find Out If It’s Being Drafted by the Army
• TIME: Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge
• Engadget: Anthropic weakens its safety pledge in the wake of the Pentagon's pressure campaign

I thought this was video game jargon!

Is there a reason why the first sentence of this post would not suffice (even if perhaps moved to the end of the document)?

Hmm, I'm not confident that Bob is wrong here. It seems to me that there's a quite plausible argument that EA's involvement in AI has been net-negative, possibly so net-negative as to cancel out all of the rest of EA. You seem to assume that this was knowable in advance, but that's not necessarily so.

Your argument seems to assume that one should "shut up and multiply" and then run with that estimated EV number; but there have been many arguments on this forum and elsewhere about why we shouldn't trust naive EV estimates.