Nuka zaria: research if Chatgpt is quoting from a parallel universe
 

(Well, it's already the cruelest month in UK, right?)

My conjecture is that you cannot fully separate MA and AI safety / alignment - or worse, solve AI safety first and then ask AI to solve values for you. We should solve them together, as some sets of values will be incompatible w some approaches to safety, and some AI development pathways will make some sets of values inaccessible (e.g., I don't think that an egalitarian world for our descendants is a likely outcome w the current trend)

Great post, thanks.
Did your search for a new intervention include control / eradication of NWS (C. hominivorax)? It's an endemic parasite in French Guayane (actually, I suspect that's where Coquerel first identified it in XIX century), affecting wild and farmed animals alike (and killing at the very least 100 humans/year), any large scale policy would eventually depend on / benefit from French (and perhaps EU) support, and almost no one is working on that from a animal welfare / rights POV (except for Screwworm Free Future is hiring for a Director — EA Forum).

Is Climate-sensitivity super-wrong?

Thomas Homer-Dixon on why James Hansen's latest climate findings matter

"The bottom line is startling: Hansen’s team argues that mainstream climate science, as reflected in the IPCC’s reports, underestimates climate sensitivity to CO2 by about 50 percent. Their research suggests that the “short-term”—century time scale—equilibrium warming from a doubling of CO2e should be 4.5 degrees C, not the standard estimate of 3 degrees.

The reason for this error, in the view of Hansen and his team, is that conventional climate science, which is almost wholly wedded to climate models, has miscalculated the past impact of aerosols on warming trends. Now that shipping aerosols have declined dramatically across the north Pacific and Atlantic, that extra climate forcing is being revealed—ergo the acceleration. Paleoclimatic data, they argue, also support a substantially higher estimate of climate sensitivity."
https://chalkboard.cascadeinstitute.org/a-climate-science-wake-up-call-james-hansens-latest-research/

SBF was willing to bribe Trump w $5bi so he wouldn't run in 2024. That's not what I'd call "undervalue".

thanks. seems to be way better than the new Mission Impossible plot. you could send it to Nature Futures: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03507-x
 

Non-opioid painkiller wins approval

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the non-opioid painkiller suzetrigine for short-term pain management. Suzetrigine is the first pain drug given a regulatory nod in more than 20 years that works through a brand-new mechanism, without the risks of addiction or sedation. Unlike opioids, the drug doesn’t act in the brain, instead blocking certain sodium channels in pain-sensing cells in the peripheral nervous system. When it comes to chronic pain — where the need for safer, non-opioid alternatives is most pressing — trials haven’t proven suzetrigine’s efficacy, nor were they long enough to rule out side effects from long-term use.

Also, how much do sexing strains in SIT facilities reduce the cost of SIT?

Probably can't cut costs by more than half, right? Assuming the sex ratio is 1:1, now you can double the production of flies with the same input, I guess?

Sorry if I am being unfair, but itseems to me a bit naïve to base all of your Structural Democratic Reforms project solely on election theory, and ignore other institutions that are extremely impactful, but more neglected by and less accountable to the wide public, such as Supreme Courts, Central Banks and regulatory authorities (and even Audit Institutions).

Before the Hamas's attack, Israel was in political turmoil because a sort of constitutional crisis between its Supreme Court and the government regarding the 2023 Israeli judicial reform. Current US Supreme Court not only struck Roe v. Wade this year, but it also decided that, while the Head of the Executive is immune against prosecution for any official act (Trump v. U.S.), regulatory authorities (that ultimately respond to the President) have no power to issue binding interpretations of statutory law (Loper Bright Enterprises et al.), thus ending four decades of the Chevron deference doctrine. Now consider that Supreme Courts allegedly have a longevity problem - they used to serve for an average 17 years, and are now predicted to serve for 35 years. Other jurisdictions face similar issues (e.g.: Brazilian judiciary has had a tremendous political impact in the last 10 years, and now legislators want to restrict Supreme Court judges powers).
An obvious fix would be adopting term limits, but, though I am a passionate defender of judicial review, I think that centralizing so much power on such a small body is a mechanism design nightmare.

And Central Banks face political scrutiny everywhere; yet, while Open Philanthropy did fund research on macroeconomics and there's a consensus that monetary authorities must be insulated from the Executive, I am unaware of anyone in EA-space currently doing research on Central Bank politics (though, here, I would say it's probably not a neglected topic - it's just that the public tends to ignore it, and maybe crypto-friendly EAs just despise central bankers).