Something that I personally would find super valuable is to see you work through a forecasting problem "live" (in text). Take an AI question that you would like to forecast, and then describe how you actually go about making that forecast. The information you seek out, how you analyze it, and especially how you make it quantitative. That would

1. make the forecast process more transparent for someone who wanted to apply skepticism to your bottom line
2. help me "compare notes", ie work through the same forecasting question that you pose, come to a conclusion, and eventually see how my reasoning compares to yours.

This exercise does double duty as "substantive take about the world for readers who want an answer" and "guide to forecasting for readers who want to do the same".

But neglectedness as a heuristic is very good precisely for narrowing down what you think the good opportunity is. Every neglected field is a subset of a non-neglected field. So pointing out that great grants have come in some subset of a non neglected field doesn't tell us anything.

To be specific, it's really important that EA identifies the area within that neglected field where resources aren't flowing, to minimize funging risk. Imagine that AI safety polling had not been neglected and that in fact there were tons of think tanks who planned to do AI safety polling and tons of funders who wanted to make that happen. Then even though it would be important and tractable, EA funding would not be counterfactually impactful, because those hypothetical factors would lead to AI safety polling happening with or without us. So ignoring neglectedness would lead to us having low impact.

I consider myself good at sniffing out edited images but I can't spot any signs in Balenciaga Pope. Besides, for a deepfake to be useful, it only has to be convincing to a large minority of people, including very technologically unsophisticated people.

I read it as "providing enough funding for independent auditors of charities to exist and be financially sustainable"

Cluster thinking vs sequence thinking remains unbeaten as a way to typecast EA disagreements. It's been a while since I saw it discussed on the forum. Maybe lots of newer EAs don't even know about it!

Serious question: doesn't that cut against the efficacy of corporate campaigns? How would an organization ever know if the company was respecting their promise?

I've been thinking about this post for days, which is a great sign, and in particular I think there's a deep truth in the following:

Indeed, my guess is that people’s utility in the goods available today does have an upper asymptote, that new goods in the future could raise our utility above that bound, and that this cycle has been played out many times already.

I realize this is tangential to your point about GDP measurement, but I think Uzawa's theorem probably set growth theory back by decades. By axiomatizing that technical change is labor-augmenting, we became unable to speak coherently about automation, something that is only changing recently. I think there is so much more we can understand about technical change that we don't yet. My best guess of the nature of technological progress is as follows:

1. In the long run, capital and labor are gross substitutes, and basically all technological change in existing goods is capital-augmenting (-> labor-replacing by the gross substitutes assumption).
2. However, we constantly create new goods that have a high labor share of costs (e.g. the services transition). These goods keep increasing as a share of the economy and cause an increase in wages.

This idea is given some empirical support by Hubmer 2022 and theoretical clarity by Jones and Liu 2024, but it's still just a conjecture. So I think the really important question about AI is whether the tons of new products it will enable will themselves be labor-intensive or capital-intensive. If the new products are capital-intensive, breaking with historical trend, then I expect that the phenomenon you describe (good 2's productivity doesn't grow) will not happen.

Yeah I was referring more to whether it can bring new ways of spending money to improve the world. There will be new market failures to solve, new sorts of technology that society could gain from accelerating, new ways to get traction on old problems