All of MathiasKB🔸's Comments + Replies

perhaps targetmalaria.org

Anyone here who is planning to donate £5000-10000 to registered UK charities before end of year?

If so, I would like to facilitate a donor swap to animal welfare charities:
- Asia Accountability Initiative
- Screwworm Free Future

(ie. I give to the UK registered charity you were planning on donating to, and you donate to my preferred charity instead).

For inspiration, both Givewell and Giving What We Can are UK tax deductible, so anyone making donations to those could in principle do a swap.

I disagree completely. The goal of a job ad should be to turn off candidates who are not a good fit so they don't bother applying, and turn on applicants who would be a good fit.

Their job ad being divisive is a good thing, if it is effective at filtering for the people they are looking for.

There was that RCT showing that creatine supplementation boosted the IQs of only vegetarians. 

My understanding is that the most rigorous RCT on creatine for cognitive performance found no difference between vegetarians and meat eaters and virtually no effect size in either case.

(conflict of interest note, I'm pretty good friends with Apart's founder)

One thing I really like about Apart is how meritocratic it is. Anyone can sign up for a hackathon, and if your project is great, win a prize. They then help prize winners with turning their project into publishable research. This year two prize winners even ended up presenting their work orally at ICLR (!!).

Nobody cares what school you went to. Nobody is looking at your gender age or resume. What matters is the quality of your work and nothing but.

And it turns out that when you look j... (read more)

The EA movement is chock-full of people who are good at programming. What about open-sourcing the EA source code and outsourcing development of new features to volunteer members who want to contribute?

no, thanks

This post makes me feel very positive about GWWC and its future! It's hard to overrate the value of focus. One thing I would love to learn is what you are doubling down on as a result.

No idea, it's probably worth reaching out to ask them and alert them in case they aren't already mindful of it! I personally am not the least bit interested in this concern, so I will not take any action to address it.

I am not saying this to be a dick (I hope), but because I don't want to give you a mistaken impression that we are currently making any effort to address this consideration at Screwworm Free Future.

I think people are far too happy to give an answer like: "Thanks for highlighting this concern, we are very mindful of this throughout our work" w... (read more)

Wishing Centre For, the best of luck!

I do a lot of writing at my job, and find myself using AI more and more for drafting. I find it especially helpful when I am stuck.

Like any human assigned with a writing task, Claude cannot magically guess what you want. I find that when I see other people get lackluster writing results with AI, it's very often due to providing almost no context for the AI to work with.

When asking for help with a draft, I will often write out a few paragraphs of thoughts on the draft. For example, if I were brainstorming ideas for a title, I might write out a prompt like:
&... (read more)

Really incredible job, really exciting to see so many great projects come out of Catalyze. Hopefully people will consider funding not just the projects, but also consider the new incubator which created them!

On a side note, I am especially excited about TamperSec and see their work as the most important technical contribution that can be made to AI governance currently.

Don't put all of your savings into shady cryptocurrencies. If it sounds good to be true, it is because it probably is.

that when I wrote the comment, the post was at -4 upvotes!

Why on earth are people downvoting this post?

Figuring out how to respond to the USAID freeze (and then doing it) is probably the most important question in global health and development right now. That there has been virtually no discussion on the forum so far has frankly been quite shocking to me.

Have a fat upvote, wishing you the best of luck

More dakka is to pour more firepower onto a problem. Two examples:

Example: "bright lights don't help my seasonal depression". More dakka: "have you tried even brighter lights?"

Example: we brainstormed ten ideas, none of them seem good. More dakka: "Try listing a 100 ideas"

Thank you for pursuing this line of argument, I think the question of legal rights for AI is a really important one. One thought i've had reading your previous posts about this, is whether it legal rights will matter not only for securing the welfare of AI but also for safeguarding humanity.

I haven't really thought this fully through, but here's my line of thinking:

As we are currently on track to create superintelligence and I don't think we can say anything with much confidence about whether the AI we create will value the same things as us, it might be i... (read more)

I have pushed the idea on the CE research team to the point I’m sure they’re sick of hearing me rant about it!

To my knowledge it’s on their list of ideas to research for their next round of animal welfare charities

Merry Christmas and happy holidays :)

I haven't looked into this at all, but the effect of eradication efforts (whether through gene drive or the traditional sterile insect technique) is that screwworm stop reproducing and cease to exist, not that they die anguishing deaths.

I'm in San Francisco this weekend and next week, if you're in the bay area want to meet, don't hesitate to reach out :) (both happy to meet 1-1 and at social events)

How big a deal is the congressional commission? What is the historical track record of Congress implementing the commission's top recommendation?

With hindsight, this comment from Jan Kulveit looks prescient.

I decided to drown a puppy in a local pond. Hopefully, doing so would toughen its character, rather than allowing it to succumb to modern frailty.

Laughed out loud for a good minute after reading this!

I strongly upvoted this post because I'm extremely interested in seeing it get more attention and, hopefully, a potential rebuttal. I think this is extremely important to get to the bottom of!

At first glance your critiques seem pretty damning, but I would have to put a bunch of time into understanding ACE's evaluations first before I would be able to conclude whether I agree your critiques (I can spend a weekend day doing this and writing up my own thoughts in a new post if there is interest).

My expectation is that if I were to do this I would come out fee... (read more)

Doesn't look like it

This is what my frontpage looks like

Naively, is there a case for using the average of the two?

EDIT: Someone on lesswrong linked a great report by Epoch which tries to answer exactly this.

With the release of openAI o1, I want to ask a question I've been wondering about for a few months.

Like the chinchilla paper, which estimated the optimal ratio of data to compute, are there any similar estimates for the optimal ratio of compute to spend on inference vs training?

In the release they show this chart:

The chart somewhat gets at what I want to know, but doesn't answer it completely. How much additional inference compute would I need a 1e25 o1-like model ... (read more)

Thanks for all of the hard work you put into developing and maintaining it! 

Thanks, this was quite informative. Would love to read the full report, but $1000 is a bit steep!

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34pz6ni3muwPnenLS/why-so-many-racists-at-manifest

Without having read the letter yet, why do you find it questionable?

Good question, not sure how I get it into my email actually, I can't find it on the website either

edit: I think it's through the forecasting newsletter

I can highly recommend following Sentinel's weekly minutes, a weekly update from superforecasters on the likelihood of any events which plausibly could cause worldwide catastrophe.

Perhaps the weekly newsletter I look the most forward to at this point. Read previous issues here: 

https://sentinel-team.org/blog/

Jeff, your notes on NAO are fascinating to read! I have nothing to add other than that I hope you keep posting them

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the question! I've been meaning to write down my thoughts on this for a while, so here is a longer perspective:

In 2015 USAID teamed up with Givewell to cash-benchmark one of its programs. The evidence came back showing that cash-transfers outperformed the program on every metric. What gets brought up less often is that the programme got its funding renewed shortly after anyways! The cash-benchmark alone was not sufficient, you also need some policy to require programs worse than cash should be wound down.

This is a sentiment I'm full... (read more)

As a side note, one thing I find amusing is just how much it sucks to announce your org's shut down after Maternal Health Initiative set the bar so ridiculously high.

Even at shutting down they have us beat!

Any ideas for what we can do to improve it?

The whole manifund debacle has left me quite demotivated. It really sucks that people are more interested debating contentious community drama, than seemingly anything else this forum has to offer.

Why are seitan products so expensive?

I strongly believe in the price, taste, convenience hypothesis. If/when non-animal foods are cheaper and tastier, I expect the west to undergo a moral cascade where factory farming in a very short timespan will go from being common place to illegal. I know that in the animal welfare space, this view point is often considered naive, but I remain convinced its true.

My mother buys the expensive vegan mayonnaise because it's much tastier than the regular mayonnaise. I still eat dairy and eggs because the vegan alternatives ... (read more)

I'm keeping an eye out for Sentinel's analyses: https://forecasting.substack.com/p/alert-minutes-for-week-172024

I'm worried too!

Does anyone know if there been any research into creating engaging television for factory farmed animals? Google scholar didn't get much outside of using TV to induce feeding in chickens. I know there have been evaluations of branched chains as a way to improve the conditions for pigs, but I haven't seen any evaluation of television.

There's 24/7 television made for house cats, why couldn't something similar exist for chickens?

I'm not going to find time to look into this myself, so if somebody finds the idea intriguing, don't hesitate with starting!

Thanks for carrying out this analysis! Do you have a spreadsheet with the calculations? Personally, I find it's much easier for me to understand the calculations and assumptions in that format. Being able to make a copy and play around with the input values to see which inputs drive the end line result is also super helpful.

Thanks! Very kind of you to say that

Gene drives remove the need to continuously rear and drop screwworms. Counting insect welfare I would wager advocacy for using gene drives looks better not worse.

Thanks, I'm looking forward to that post!

I'll be honest, to me the numbers sound too good to be true, so I'm curious to understand the assumptions that go into those numbers and whether I agree with them.

If the numbers really are that good that's quite exciting!

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/corporate-animal-welfare-campaigns

According to research by the Welfare Footprint Project, both of these asks substantially decrease hours in pain experienced by farmed chickens,^[2][3] decreasing chicken suffering by an estimated 30%–60%.^[4][5]

According to estimates by Šimčikas,^[6] corporate campaigns between 2015 and the end of 2018 will improve the welfare of 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent.

Is there a cost-effectiveness analysis available where I can read how you arrived at these numbers?

• Cost per client served: $4.7
• Cost per unintended pregnancies averted: $3.60
• Cost per maternal death averted: $685
• Cost per DALY: $1.63
• Cost per CYP: $2.31