Great post! I definitely feel similar regarding giving - while giving cured my guilt about my privileged position in the world, I don't feel as amazing as I thought I would when giving - it is indeed a lot like taxes. I feel like a better person in the background day-to-day, but the actual giving now feels pretty mundane.

I'm thinking I might save up my next donation for a few months and donate enough to save a full life in one go - because of a quirk in human brains I imagine that would be more satisfying than saving 20% of a life 5 times.

For the Astra Fellowship, what considerations do you think people should be thinking about when deciding to apply for SERI MATS, Astra Fellowship, or both? Why would someone prefer one over the other, given they're both happening at similar times?

"All leading labs coordinate to slow during crunch time: great. This delays dangerous AI and lengthens crunch time. Ideally the leading labs slow until risk of inaction is as great as risk of action on the margin, then deploy critical systems.

All leading labs coordinate to slow now: bad. This delays dangerous AI. But it burns leading labs' lead time, making them less able to slow progress later (because further slowing would cause them to fall behind, such that other labs would drive AI progress and the slowed labs' safety practices would be irrelevant)."

I would be more inclined to agree with this if there was a set of criteria we had that indicated we were in "crunch time" which we are very likely to meet before dangerous systems and haven't met now. Have people generated such a set? Without that, how do we know when "crunch time" is, or for that matter, if we're already here?

Great post! Another thing worth pointing out is another advantage of giving yourself capacity. I try to operate at around 80-90% capacity. This allows me time to notice and pursue better opportunities as they arise, and imo this is far more valuable to your long-term output than a flat +10% multiplier. As we know from EA resources, working on the right thing can multiply your effectiveness by 2x, 10x, or more. Giving yourself extra slack makes you less likely to get stuck in local optima.

Thanks Elle, I appreciate that. I believe your claims - I fully believe it's possible to safely go vegan for an extended period, I'm just not sure how difficult it is (i.e, what's the default outcome, if one tries without doing research first) and what ways there are to prevent that outcome if the outcome is not good.

I shall message you, and welcome to the forum!

With respect to Point 2, I think that EA is not large enough that a large AI activist movement would be comprised mostly of EA aligned people. EA is difficult and demanding - I don't think you're likely to get a "One Million EA" march anytime soon. I agree that AI activists who are EA aligned are more likely to be in the set of focused, successful activists (Like many of your friends!) but I think you'll end up with either:

- A small group of focused, dedicated activists who may or may not be largely EA aligned
- A large group of unfocused-by-default, relatively casual activists, most of whom will not be EA aligned

If either of those two would be effective at achieving goals, then I think that makes AI risk activism a good idea. If you need a large group of focused, dedicated activists - I don't think we're going to get that.

As for Point 1, it's certainly possible - especially if having a large group of relatively unfocused people would be useful. I have no idea if this is true, so I have no idea if raising awareness is an impactful idea at this point. (Also, there are those that have made the point that raising AI risk awareness tends to make people more likely to race for AGI, not less - see OpenAI)

I think there's a bit of an "ugh field" around activism for some EA's, especially the rationalist types in EA. At least, that's my experience.

My first instinct, when I think of activism, is to think about people who:

- Have incorrect, often extreme beliefs or ideologies.
- Are aggressively partisan.
- Are more performative than effective with their actions.

This definitely does not describe all activists, but it does describe some activists, and may even describe the median activist. That said, this shouldn't be a reason for us to discard this idea immediately out of hand - after all, how good is the median charity? Not that great compared to what EA's actually do.

Perhaps there's a mass-movement issue here though - activism tends to be best with a large groundswell of numbers. If you have a hundred thousand AI safety activists, you're simply not going to have a hundred thousand people with a nuanced and deep understanding of the theory of change behind AI safety activism. You're going to have a few hundred of those, and ninety nine thousand people who think AI is bad for Reason X, and that's the extent of their thinking, and X varies wildly in quality.

Thus, the question is - would such a movement be useful? For such a movement to be useful, it would need to be effective at changing policy, and it would need to be aimed at the correct places. Even if the former is true, I find myself skeptical that the latter would occur, since even AI policy experts are not yet sure where to aim their own efforts, let alone how to communicate where to aim so well that a hundred thousand casually-engaged people can point in the same useful direction.

I am one of those meat-eating EA's, so I figured I'd give some reasons why I'm not vegan, to aid the goals of this post in finding out about these things.

Price: While I can technically afford it, I still prefer to save money when possible.
Availability: A lot of food out there, especially frozen foods which I buy a lot of since I don't like cooking, involves meat. It's simply easier to decide on meals when meat is an option.
Knowledge: If I were to go vegan, I would be unsure how to go vegan safely for an extended period, and how to make sure I got a decent variety rather than eating the same foods over and over (which comes into taste - I don't mind vegan food but there's much more variety I can find in meat-based dishes)
Convenience: Similarly to above - it takes resources to seek out vegan options, more resources than to just eat normally.

The harms are real, but the harms are far away and abstract. So when I feel vaguely guilty about eating meat, I think about all the hassle and cost it would take to swap diets, and I shy away from it and don't do it. 

I'm not quite sure why those harms are far away and abstract, whereas the harms caused by malaria or AI risk don't invoke the same feelings in me. I think it's because I can use maths to determine the number of humans impacted and then put myself in the place of one of those humans - it's harder to do that with chickens. Also, giving away 10% of my income is actually less of a day-to-day drain on my resources than going vegan would be. I feel aversion to spending money, but I only give away money once a month, and it doesn't cause me financial hardship. By contrast, veganism requires daily effort.

As a micro-example of where these considerations don't apply - there are some plant meat based strips that I can get at my local supermarket. I find them tastier than actual meat when put into curry, and they're just as cheap when on special. So whenever they're on special, I pick a bunch of them up and they become my default option for a while. I know how to cook them, I know where to get them, they're just as cheap (sometimes) and I enjoy the taste. So I end up avoiding meat by default. I hope plant-based meat will eventually reach that saturation point for all kinds of dishes too.

Seems like a pretty incredible opportunity for those interested! What level of time commitment do you expect reading and understanding the book to take, in addition to the meetings?

Looking at the two critiques in reverse order:

I think it's true that it's easy for EA's to lose sight of the big picture, but to me, the reason for that is simple - humans, in general, are terrible at seeing the bigger picture. If anything, it seems to me that the EA frameworks are better than most altruistic endeavours at seeing the big picture - most altruistic endeavors don't get past the stage of "See good thing and do it", whereas EA's tend to be asking if X is really the most effective thing they can do, which invariably involves looking at a bigger picture than the immediate thing. In my own field of AI safety, thinking about the big picture is an idea that people are routinely exposed to. Researchers often do exercises like backchaining (ask what the main goal is, like "Make AI go well" and figure out how to move backwards from that to what you should be doing now) and theory of change (Writing out specifically what problem you want to help, what you want to achieve, and how that will help)

Do you think there are specific vulnerabilities that EA's have that make them lose sight of the bigger picture, that non-EA altruistic people avoid?

For the point of foregoing fulfillment - I'm not sure exactly what fulfillment you think people are foregoing, here. Is it the fulfillment of having lots of money? The fulfillment of working directly on the world's biggest problems?