I know Grace has seen this already, but in case others reading this thread are interested: I've shared some thoughts on not taking the pledge (yet) here.^[1]

Adding to the post: part of the value of pledges like this comes from their role as a commitment mechanism to prevent yourself from drifting away from values and behaviors that you endorse. I'm not currently worried about drifting in this way, partly because I work for CEA and have lots of social connections to extremely altruistic people. If I started working somewhere that isn't explicitly EA-oriented... (read more)

As a quick update: I did not in fact share two posts during the week. I'll try to post another "DAW post" (i.e. something from my drafts, without spending too much time polishing it) sometime soon, but I don't endorse prioritizing this right now and didn't meet my commitment. 

Just chiming in with a quick note: I collected some tips on what could make criticism more productive in this post: "Productive criticism: what could help?"

I'll also add a suggestion from Aaron: If you like a post, tell the author! (And if you're not sure about commenting with something you think isn't substantive, you can message the author a quick note of appreciation or even just heart-react on the post.) I know that I get a lot out of appreciative comments/messages related to my posts (and I want to do more of this myself). 

I'll commit to posting a couple of drafts. Y'all can look at me with disapproval (or downvote this comment) if I fail to share two posts during Draft Amnesty Week. 

I really like this post and am curating it (I might be biased in my assessment, but I endorse it and Toby can't curate his own post). 

A personal note: the opportunity framing has never quite resonated with me (neither has the "joy in righteousness" framing), but I don't think I can articulate what does motivate me. Some of my motivations end up routing through something ~social. For instance, one (quite imperfect, I think!) approach I take^[1] is to imagine some people (sometimes fictional or historical) I respect and feel a strong urge to be the ... (read more)

Thanks for sharing this! I'm going to use this thread as a chance to flag some other recent updates (no particular order or selection criteria — just what I've recently thought was notable or recently mentioned to people): 

1. California proposes sweeping safety measure for AI — State Sen. Scott Wiener wants to require companies to run safety tests before deploying AI models. (link goes to "Politico Pro"; I only see the top half)
   1. Here's also Senator Scott Wiener's Twitter thread on the topic (note the endorsements)
   2. See also the California effect
2. Trump: AI ‘m

I don't actually think you need to retract your comment — most of the teams they used did have (at least some) biological expertise, and it's really unclear how much info the addition of the crimson cells adds. (You could add a note saying that they did try to evaluate this with the additional of two crimson cells? In any case, up to you.)

(I will also say that I don't actually know anything about what we should expect about the expertise that we might see on terrorist cells planning biological attacks — i.e. I don't know which of these is actually appropriate.)

It's potentially also worth noting that the difference in scores was pretty enormous: 

 their jailbreaking expertise did not influence their performance; their outcome for biological feasibility appeared to be primarily the product of diligent reading and adept interpretation of the gain-of-function academic literature during the exercise rather than access to the model.

This is pretty interesting to me (although it's basically an ~anecdote, given that it's just one team); it reminds me of some of the literature around superforecasters. 

(I pro... (read more)

The experiment did try to check something like this by including three additional teams with different backgrounds than the other 12. In particular, two "crimson teams" were added, which had "operational experience" but no LLM or bio experience. Both used LLMs and performed ~terribly. 

Excerpts (bold mine):

In addition to the 12 red cells [the primary teams], a crimson cell was assigned to LLM A, while a crimson cell and a black cell were assigned to LLM B for Vignette 3. Members of the two crimson cells lacked substantial LLM or biological experience b

We explored related questions briefly for "Are there diseconomies of scale in the reputation of communities?", for what it's worth (although we didn't focus on donors specifically). See e.g. this section.

Just focusing on the reputational effects, my quick guess is that the extent to which a donor/public figure is ~memetically connected to the movement/charity is really important, and I expect that most Giving Pledge signatories are significantly less connected to the Giving Pledge (or American higher education donors to American higher education) than the ... (read more)

Thanks a bunch for this report! I haven't had the time to read it very carefully, but I've already really enjoyed it and am curating the post. 

I'm also sharing some questions I have, my highlights, and my rough understanding of the basic model setup (pulled from my notes as I was skimming the report). 

A couple of questions / follow-up discussions

1. I'm curious about why you chose to focus specifically on biological risks. 
   1. I expect that it's usually good to narrow the scope of reports like this and you do outline the scope at the beginning,^[1]&n

USAID has announced that they've committed $4 million to fighting global lead poisoning! 

USAID Administrator Samantha Power also called other donors to action, and announced that USAID will be the first bilateral donor agency to join the Global Alliance to Eliminate Lead Paint. The Center for Global Development (CGD) discusses the implications of the announcement here. 

For context, lead poisoning seems to get ~$11-15 million per year right now, and has a huge toll. I'm really excited about this news.

Also, thanks to @ryancbriggs for pointing out t... (read more)

Semi-relatedly, I'd also be interested in hearing about some of EAIF's past grants that you think were particularly exciting/successful (this might have already gotten covered in one of the other posts — apologies if so!). 

I appreciate the discussion here and am curating this post. (Thanks for getting the ball rolling!) Some related things I think I'd like to see: 

1. More comparisons between the options discussed here (e.g. how good are some pro-immigration options, or even an idealized pro-immigration option, relative to something like GiveDirectly, targeted agricultural productivity research/investment, or governance improvements?)
2. More discussion about and estimates of the actual value of donations aimed at boosting economic growth
   1. Donations vs. other approaches
      1. E.g. maybe

I'm not sure how many volunteer opportunities like this there are, but I'd check the EA Opportunity Board, which collects "everything short of permanent positions" (see Airtable — the normal interface seems broken for me right now). You should be able to filter "opportunity type" for volunteering, and "location filter" by whatever works for you (or not remote). (See also the 80K job board, which doesn't tend to focus on volunteer opportunities.) 

You might also be interested in exploring events.

Thanks! I agree that the approach you describe is optimal under very reasonable assumptions, but I think in practice few people used it (the median ratio between someone's top choice and their second choice was 2, the mean if you throw out one outlier was ~20; only 7 people voted for at least 2 candidates and had ratios between their top two that were at least 20). Moreover, we had some^[1] voters who didn't vote the way you describe, but who did assign a fairly big number of projects similar small point values — I think kind of throwing in some points... (read more)

I'm curating this post — and I'd love to see more reflections on 2023 from other perspectives and fields. (Thanks for cross-posting it!)

...all advocacy for farmed animals globally has a combined budget smaller than the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. And yet we’ve already achieved progress for billions of sentient beings.

This is wild. I wanted to find some estimates; it looks like this report estimates that around $200M was spent on farmed animal welfare in 2020 (with around 10% growth per year, and not counting industry investments into alt proteins)... (read more)

Someone else I talked to is also in favor of RCV, and I agree that it has benefits (e.g. easier to use than this system), but I also think it has some downsides — e.g. I think it's a worse exercise for voters than this system is. Btw, you might also be interested in the discussion that happened on my quick take before we decided on a voting system. 

(My current top, low-resilience guess about changes we should make to the voting system, if we ran this again, is that we should remove the 3-winner restriction and that we should think about trying to get ... (read more)

I agree that this is hard with available data. I guess we could try to look at donation data e.g. from here or responses to this post and see how well it matches what people collectively voted for (ideally weighted by ~Forum engagement), but both groups are probably pretty different from the voting group (and the second group is small). A lot of comments on why people voted the way they did also noted something about why they're donating to the candidates they voted for (but definitely not all comments). 

Also: 

• A lot of people probably donated to

Thanks for bringing this up! I actually explored this a bit, but hid it in a footnote: 

Interestingly, I think approval voting would have yielded similar winners (with a big assumption about how to extrapolate what people would have “approved” of) — if you rank projects by the number of voters who gave it at least 10%, for instance, the picture doesn’t change much (if you increase from 10% to 20%, LTFF starts showing up in the top 3 again). 

What would have happened with ranked-choice voting is [more] unclear to me; the voting system was in fact ve

I want to be really careful about not de-anonymizing voters (even internally), but I'll see what we can check safely. 

Re: the number of voters: I'm not sure. I wish more people had voted, but it's generally quite hard to get people to do things (see e.g. the 1% rule and its variants), and this is not outside of my expectations.^[1] We probably could have done more to advertise the election; I'd include that in lessons for next time (although I also think that, if the Forum runs another election in a year, there'll be more natural interest as this ... (read more)

I really loved people's comments on why they voted the way they did, but this post is already quite long, so I'm sharing a longer list of excerpts as a sort of "Appendix Comment." 

Why people voted the way they did (& other highlights from the comments) - extended edition

“Realized I'm too partial to [global health] and biased against animal welfare, [so I committed to vote for the] most effective animal organization. Rethink's post was very convincing. CE has the most innovative ideas in GHD and it isn't close. GiveWell is GiveWell.” 

If you voted in the Donation Election, how long did it take you? (What did you spend the most time on?)

I'd be really grateful for quick notes. (You can also private message me if you prefer.) 

I think it's probably too late to set up, unfortunately, but if we do this again next year I think it's a thing to keep in mind. 

Relatedly, here are some Manifold Markets about whether the Donation Election Fund will reach: 

1. $40K
2. $50K
3. $75K
4. $100K

Here's a long excerpt (happy to take it down if asked, but I think people might be more likely to go read the whole thing if they see part of it): 

The only thing everyone agrees on is that the only two things EAs ever did were “endorse SBF” and “bungle the recent OpenAI corporate coup.”

In other words, there’s never been a better time to become an effective altruist! Get in now, while it’s still unpopular! The times when everyone fawns over us are boring and undignified. It’s only when you’re fighting off the entire world that you feel truly alive.

And

+1 to The Emperor of all Maladies

(Replied via email.) 

Hi! Sorry for the delay in my response here: 

• Unfortunately, we could only list organizations from here as candidates in the Donation Election this year (largely due to vetting capacity and the current system we’re using for the election). I tried to make this clear in the announcement posts, but I think it ended up being confusing.
• However, we can add your project in the Giving Portal here if you send us a logo,^[1] a link to a fundraiser or your donation page (which ideally also shares some information about what you do and why people should consi

FYI — lots of relevant links collected here: OpenAI: The Battle of the Board  and OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend 

There was an earlier post from lots of people at CEA, including me: Here’s where CEA staff are donating in 2023

Quick summary of my section: I donated to the Donation Election Fund for the reasons described here, to someone's political campaign^[1], and in some cases I didn't take compensation I was supposed to get from organizations I'd happily donate to. 

1. ^{^}

   I feel weird donating to political campaigns (I grew up ~avoiding politics and still have a lot of the same beliefs and intuitions). But I talked to some people I know about the value of this campaig

I guess the framing of the post is pretty relevant: these projects would be over the bar if the LTFF got more donations. (Although I appreciate it being important to avoid discouraging people.) 

I might also flag that I don't think getting rejected generally has costs besides the time you put in and your motivation (someone from LTFF could correct me if I'm wrong). So applying is often worth it even if you think it's pretty likely that you'll get rejected. This isn't to say that rejection is hard; here's a thread with tips and others' experiences. But ... (read more)

Thanks for engaging! Quick thoughts:

1. Yeah, I don't expect to be passing on a nontrivial inheritance to kids. Pledging to do something specific here currently seems unfeasible, though; I have no idea what the world will be like when I'm in my 70s. Examples of weirdness (even setting aside AI developments): maybe we've made serious medical breakthroughs and I'm still expecting to work for a long time, maybe money works in seriously different ways, etc. I haven't thought about this much, though, and it might be worth thinking about (e.g. maybe there's a nicely

YouTube link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX_vN1QYgmE (it's embedded in the post, as JohnSnow points out — not sure if something is breaking for you?)

Transcript here: https://www.ted.com/talks/liv_boeree_the_dark_side_of_competition_in_ai/transcript 

This comment seems pretty irrelevant to the post it's on. Please stay on topic in comment sections. I'll bring this up to the rest of the moderation team. 

Most of the info on exhausted ballots was in footnotes, unfortunately: 

If all of a voter’s points were assigned to candidates which are now eliminated, we’ll pretend that the voter spread their points out equally across the remaining candidates. 

[Footnote: 

Why this might make sense, intuitively: 

We could treat votes from people whose voted-on candidates have all been eliminated (or whose remaining votes are 0's) as non-votes (i.e. the fact that they voted doesn’t affect the vote at all at this point), or we could pretend that the 0’s th

This is a good idea, thanks! (I'm not sure if we'll use it, but I expect Agnes or someone else will check what's confusing to people and might try this as an alternative.) Although I think the ranked-choice approximation would involve larger ratios (but I'm not sure). (We might also add a tool that lets people compare pairs of charities to produce a draft allocation of points, which might be easier for some people to work with.)

We aren't planning on having a point limit. We might display the sum of points someone's distributed on the point-allocation page, in case that's useful for them to check as they're allocating points. But we'll normalize points ourselves. 

Thanks for flagging/asking! We were exploring creating more "types" of content and potentially distinguishing between them more in the future, and this tag was in part an attempt to see what would happen if we created it. We haven't done more with this since then, really, so should probably delete it (but we might discuss a bit more before we do that). 

Hi! I think we might have a bug — I'm not sure where you're seeing those emojis on the Forum. For me, here are the emojis that show up: 

@Agnes Stenlund might be able to say more about how we chose those,^[1] but I do think we went for this set as a way to create a low-friction way of sharing non-anonymous positive feedback (which authors and commenters have told us they lack, and some have told us that they feel awkward just commenting with something non-substantive but positive like "thanks!") while also keeping the UX understandable and easy to ... (read more)

One related thing I'm wondering about is how important widening the set of donors is. I.e. new donors help directly because they're donating and funding useful work, and also extra donors mean that (probably?) there's a bit more stability. I'm not sure how strongly to value the second factor. 

We're planning on having 3 winners, and we'll allocate the funding proportionally across those three winners. So e.g. if we do approval voting, and candidate A gets 5 votes, B gets 2, C gets 20, and D gets 25, and we're distributing $100, then A (5 votes), C (20 votes), and D win (25 votes) and we'd send $10 to A, $40 to C, and $50 to D. I think this would straightforwardly work with quadratic voting (each person just has multiple vote-points). I haven't thought enough about how "proportional" allocation would work with ranked-choice votes.

And yep, donating more to that fund won't get you additional votes.

Edit: I've now shared: Donation Election: how voting will work. Really grateful for the discussion on this thread!

We're planning on running a Donation Election for Giving Season. 

What do you think the final voting mechanism should be, and why? E.g. approval voting, ranked-choice voting, quadratic voting, etc. 

Considerations might include: how well this will allocate funds based on real preferences, how understandable it is to people who are participating in the Donation Election or following it, etc. 

I realize that I might be opening a can o... (read more)