Good to see more ideas on new charities.

Could you provide more details on this example idea:

Banning harmful practices (like genetic modification)

Charity Entrepreneurship produced a report on welfare focused gene modification back in 2019. Has there been a change of mind since then?

The donor is anonymous.

From the Wired article: "The temporary exhibit is funded until May by an anonymous donor..."

Thanks for all the comments.

Updated the post with a recent tweet from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI:

"recalibrate" means "increase" obviously.

disappointing to see this six-week development. openai will continually decrease the level of risk we are comfortable taking with new models as they get more powerful, not the other way around.

John Culver's How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan is also worth reading.

China’s political strategy for unification has always had a military component, as well as economic, informational, legal, and diplomatic components. Most U.S. analysis frames China’s options as a binary of peace or war and ignores these other elements. At the same time, many in Washington believe that if Beijing resorts to the use of force, the only military option it would consider is invasion. This is a dangerous oversimplification. China has many options to

You're welcome! Thanks for donating

Ray Dalio also has a TisBest $50 charity gift card page: https://www.tisbest.org/rg/ray/

This describes three utopias. It makes sense to have several since everyone has differing definitions of utopia.

The 'Psychonauts' sound like the Hedonistic Imperative version of utopia:

The Psychonauts had formed the second most popular cluster. They endorsed hedonism as a theory of value, believing that the purpose of life is the elimination of suffering and the enjoyment of bliss.

Thanks for your post, great advice.

Please ensure you include the book's title, author, and year/edition, as well as any other information requested by the library. If you're a university group organiser, it's likely helpful to note that you're with a university student group.

Maybe include the ISBN as well. For academic libraries, it's also helpful to say which students the book is relevant for. Peter Singer's books would be relevant for the Arts students studying philosophy, for example. Academic libraries can buy some extracurricular resources, but most o... (read more)

(Edit: Accidentally posted a duplicate link.)

Aligned with whom? by Anton Korinek and Avital Balwit (2022) has a possible answer. They write that an aligned AI system should have

• direct alignment with its operator, and
• social alignment with society at large.

Some examples of failures in direct and social alignment are provided in Why we need a new agency to regulate advanced artificial intelligence: Lessons on AI control from the Facebook Files (Korinek, 2021).

We could expand the moral circle further by aligning AI with the interests of both human and non-huma... (read more)

The Tech Worker Handbook website has more information about Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). It also cautions people from reading the website on a company device:

I do NOT advise accessing this from a company device. Your employer can, and will likely, track visits to a resource like this Handbook.

Business Insider's review of 36 NDAs in the tech industry:

Some NDAs say explicitly that the confidentiality provisions never sunset, effectively making them lifelong agreements...

More than two-thirds of workers who shared their agreements with Insider said they w

Thank you for posting this. Appreciate reading about his life and legacy.

Are there any links to the translations of David Pearce's works?

Thanks for the comment.

It would focus on species that have the capacity for suffering and enjoyment, so not all species.

I agree it is a hugely ambitious project. Megaprojects are within the scope of EA and its funders.

If most wild animal lives have negative wellbeing, I think this kind of intervention would be preferable to the status quo or extinction.

Thanks, I completely agree. David Pearce is the founder of this line of thought: editing and rewriting nature to reduce and eliminate involuntary suffering.

I have added a quotation to the post:

Like saving the drowning child in Singer’s thought experiment, now that gene drive technology is available, there is a choice between doing nothing and intervening to do good.

"In the post-CRISPR era, whether intelligent agents decide to preserve, reform, or phase out the biology of involuntary suffering will be an ethical choice."

David Pearce, Compassionate Biology

Many thanks for writing this essay. The history of technological restraint is fascinating. I never knew that Edward Teller wanted to design a 10-gigaton bomb.

Something I have noticed in history is that advocates of technological restraint are often labelled luddites or luddite supporters. Here's an example from 2016:

Artificial Intelligence Alarmists Win ITIF’s Annual Luddite Award

After a month-long public vote, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) today announced that it has given its annual Luddite Award to a loose coalition of scie

Lack of access to the incorporated standards, since the standards often cost hundreds of dollars each to access.

Not only are many standards expensive, but they often include digital rights management that make them cumbersome to access and open.

In Australia, access to standards is controlled by private companies that can charge whatever they like. There's currently a petition to the Australian parliament with 22,526 signatures requesting free or affordable access to Australian Standards, including standards mandated by legislation. Across the ditch, the Ne... (read more)

• Support national laws and agencies regulating advanced AI. For the US, see this bipartisan bill and this proposal to establish a federal agency.

Thanks for bringing up the idea of case studies.

It would also be useful to study verification, compliance and enforcement of these regulations: "Trust, but verify."

Thanks for your questions. Here are some thoughts:

[signalling or alarm system] would be a functional replacement, performing the same function as pain, but replacing suffering with information.

Is this something like rationality? Some individuals can learn by rational rather than emotional understanding. How can an individual's reasoning potential be known?

I think rationality would apply to both cases. Let's say you feel pain in your arm, you or your doctor would use rational methods to figure out what's wrong. The same thing would happen if a diagnostic to... (read more)

No worries. I think we have different definitions of the status quo, and that is affecting our interpretation of the survey results.

Your definition of the status quo is a form of independence: functional independence (or perhaps de facto independence). In which case, since all the survey results show that "Maintain status quo" is popular, means that independence is the most popular choice.

My definition of the status quo is something in-between unification and independence, like a third way. It's the "none of the above" choice, disapproving both unification... (read more)

Thanks for your post! Good to see this issue in the EA Forum.

Regarding the statement that:

At this point, most people in Taiwan don’t consider themselves Chinese anymore and simply want to be their own nation instead, indefinitely.

Survey data supports your first point. The vast majority of people in Taiwan call themselves "Taiwanese" or "Both Taiwanese and Chinese":

Survey data doesn't support your second point though: "[most people in Taiwan] simply want to be their own nat... (read more)

WHO published a report on malaria eradication (2020) that covers megatrends like climate change.

It is similar to other reports in recommending over $6 billion per year to meet targets.

The Lancet Commission on Malaria Eradication (2019) : "Malaria eradication is likely to cost over $6 billion per year. The world is already spending around $4.3 billion."

If eradication is achieved by 2040, that would be about $120 billion in total.

None mentioned in the report. It refers to the Methods section of an online appendix but the appendix doesn't appear to be on the website.

(Sorry, I didn't see your comment until now.)

Animal Ethics has some bibliographical lists: https://www.animal-ethics.org/bibliographical-lists/

Kyle Johannsen's book Wild Animal Ethics has extensive reference lists https://philpapers.org/rec/JOHWAE-2

Thanks very much!

Great feature! Just wondering whether Our World in Data charts can be embedded into Substack and Ghost in a similar way.

Charity Entrepreneurship has a report called "Welfare Focused Gene Modification" from March 2019 that mentions golden rice and other GMOs, mostly farm animal interventions. The report might be superseded though because it no longer appears on the website.

This is an interesting idea from the report: "A 'Good Gene Institute', similar to the Good Food Institute, that is focused on carefully and thoughtfully building public awareness and interest in individuals getting into the science of genetics-based animal issues."

Thanks for your post. There's a reasonable case for GMOs and malaria to be a cause area. Target Malaria is using genetic modification to reduce the population of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes.

Open Philanthropy writes, "It seems likely to us that the cost-effectiveness of this grant will be competitive with donations to the Against Malaria Foundation (though unlikely that it will be more than 10 times as cost-effective)" (Open Philanthropy, 2017).

An introductory reading list on wild animal welfare that covers all the important debates:

• Should we intervene in wild animal welfare?
• Will interventions work? Are they tractable?
• What impact will wild animal welfare have on the long-term future?

The post was part of a 2018 series, the Wild Animal Welfare Literature Library Project.

Wild animal welfare has increased in prominence since then, e.g. Animal Charity Evaluators has regularly identified wild animal welfare as a key cause area.

It was Isaac Asimov's favorite story of the hundreds of stories he has written.

I found the ending impossible to forget.

Spoiler:

Thanks for your post!

Would an open access repository plus an open peer review system like PREreview or the Open Peer Review Module meet your needs?

Also, is there a need to create an open access multidisciplinary repository (green open access) for effective altruism researchers? Or is the existing network of repositories enough?

Hi Aaron,

Many thanks to you and everyone for organising and funding this contest.

If anyone is interested in a sequel, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

A good opportunity to expand that short story into a novel!

Thanks for creating this comprehensive list!

For the wild animal suffering section, there’s a book by Kyle Johannsen that covers the ethics of intervention:

https://www.routledge.com/Wild-Animal-Ethics-The-Moral-and-Political-Problem-of-Wild-Animal-Suffering/Johannsen/p/book/9780367275709

The timelines do a great job of visualising how colonisation would be completed quickly on a cosmic timescale.

There was also a memorable visualisation in Scientific American depicting how space colonies grow exponentially to fill the galaxy:  Crawford, Ian (2000) Where are they? Maybe we are alone in the galaxy after all, Scientific American, July.

The time it takes to colonise the galaxy depends on the speed of the colony ships and the time it takes for new colonies to create colony ships of their own.

The remarkable thing is that the home planet only ... (read more)

That would work. Or an information symbol ⓘ (the letter 'i' in a circle).

Or a green sprout. Some games have that to indicate new players.

No worries, thanks for renaming it. I have added a short lead section.

Hello! The EA Hub has some scripts and slides in English: https://resources.eahub.org/events/intro/

Try contacting a staff member from the Groups Team, e.g. Catherine Low, for tips and pointers: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/team/

Humanitarian Assistance for Wild Animals

New article about wild animal suffering, interventions, genome editing and gene drives:

Johannsen, Kyle (2021). Humanitarian Assistance for Wild Animals. The Philosophers' Magazine 93:33-37. Available on PhilArchive: https://philarchive.org/archive/JOHHAF-5

Good idea, but one issue with donating books to a library is that the librarian still has to decide whether to accept or reject the donation. Most librarians are very selective about what gets included and what gets weeded out of their collection.

Another option is to use the library website and find the "Suggest items for the library" web form. (Search the library catalogue first to see whether the library already holds the item.) If the librarian decides to purchase the book, it is completely funded by the library budget.

You can suggest the format too: pr... (read more)

To add to arguments for inclusion, here’s an excerpt from an EA Forum post about key figures in the animal suffering focus area.

“Major inspirations for those in this focus area include Peter Singer, David Pearce, and Brian Tomasik.”

Four focus areas of effective altruism by Luke_Muehlhauser, 8th Jul 2013

David Pearce’s work on suffering and biotechnology would be more relevant now than in 2013 due to developments in genome editing and gene drives.