All of Rasool's Comments + Replies

I want to signal-boost this conversation between you and @Wei Dai (and others), and see whether you have any further thoughts on the matter

Recent piece on this you might like:

https://davidoks.blog/p/gdp-numbers-in-poor-countries-are

A good recent piece on this:

https://davidoks.blog/p/a-lot-of-population-numbers-are-fake

Talking about Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and the problems with satellite data

Karnofsky, on the Dwarkesh podcast said (emphasis mine):

I mean, you can look up our $30 million grant to OpenAI. I think it was back in 2016–– we wrote about some of the thinking behind it. Part of that grant was getting a board seat for Open Philanthropy for a few years so that we could help with their governance at a crucial early time in their development. I think some people believe that OpenAI has been net negative for the world because of the fact that they have contributed a lot to AI advancing and to AI being sort of hyped, and they think that give

I expect there is some variability, the author in this piece focuses on alcohol, which I don't know that much about, but for "Reduce unhealthy diet" (Objective 3, page 10), CEARCH did a report here, which relates to WHO's best buys (if not quite exactly matching their specified intervention), and found it to be "49,419 DALYs per USD 100,000"

For best buys in education, I recommend Rachel Glennester's 80,000 hours podcast episode, where she praises the best buys, but also criticises how education spending is done

She has a second episode, which also touches o... (read more)

Not sure if you caught it but there was a detailed critique and discussion of this 90% figure on LessWrong

There's a transcript of the Ivan Gayton podcast, and other discussion, here

In March 2025, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, predicted that 90% of code would be written by AI as early as June 2025 and no later than September 2025. This turned out to be dead wrong. 

Amodei claims that 90% of code at Anthropic (and some companies they work with) is being written by AI

There are some interesting comments on LessWrong

I have been recommended the Drone Ultimatum podcast, but haven't listened to any

Discussed on the forum here

I am a huge Ted Chiang fan, but your review misses one of the most amazing things about his writing -- it is written in very brief and straightforward words and sentences!

A number of his short stories are available for free online, for instance Exhalation in Lightspeed magazine. Under 'Works' on his Wikipedia page, you can find others (sometimes via web archives)

A large recent RCT found that free contraception had no impact on birth rates in Burkina Faso - I wonder if/how this affects this cause area

One website, which doesn't quite match all your criteria, is https://longbets.org/bets/, which has bets from people like Warren Buffet, Scott Alexander, Ray Kurzweil, and Eric Schmidt

GiveWell's cost to save a life has gone from $4,500 to a range between $3,000 and $5,500:

https://www.givewell.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-a-life

From at least as early as December 2023 (possibly as early as December 2021 when the page says it was first published) until February 2024, that page highlighted a $7.2 million 2020 grant to the Against Malaria Foundation at an estimated cost per life saved of $4,500.

The page now highlights a $6.4 million 2023 grant to the Malaria Consortium at an estimated cost per life saved of $3,000.

You can see all the es... (read more)

Many such cases

Luckily those suggestions are all useful for SEO too!

Some other things to consider (from figures like Tyler Cowen^[1] and Patrick McKenzie^[2] (edit: also Gwern) who talk about how their primary audience is now LLMs):

• Prefer short paragraphs that restate names, titles, other nouns (rather than using pronouns ("he"/"she"/"it")
  • So that LLMs can lift paragraphs wholesale, and minimises errors
• Consider what license your writing is published under
  • A more permissive license increases the likelihood of being included in training corpuses
• Design headlines to mi

You don't need to listen to podcasts as soon as they come out :) 

In fact with most media, you can wait a few weeks/months and then decide whether you actually want to read/watch/listen to it, rather than just defaulting to listening to it because it is new and shiny

In fact since you like Rob Wiblin, you can go and listen to old episodes (from another podcast) that he recommends

Blattman discusses this on the Rationally Speaking podcast

The largest single category of entrant to the UK is a person on a work visa; in the most recent year of data available, about 450,000 work visas were issued.^[3] This is closely followed by the number of people on study visas, at 415,000. Most of the study visas are for masters level courses, rather than undergraduate courses.

Despite the near endless press coverage on asylum seekers, the number of refugee/humanitarian visas granted is small by comparison.^[4] Most people who move to the UK come to work or to study.^[5]

I believe you are downpla... (read more)

To anyone skimming this, this has nothing to do with former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, but rather a paper by an unrelated person with the last name Toner-Rodgers

The UK Health Secretary in 2021, Matt Hancock, ordered 100m vaccines, rather than 30m, because of the film Contagion

https://x.com/LBC/status/1356882697222836226

Dollar Cost Averaging reduces volatility

Investing as a lump sum supposedly beats DCA even when adjusting for risk, via the Bogleheads forum, referencing a Vanguard study

There is also this (publicly listed) talk from 2022:
 

In addition, Chuck Feeney, Zell Kravinsky, and from antiquity, Diogenes

Note that the old^[1] o3-high that was tested on ARC-AGI-1:

• Was 10x more expensive than initially estimated, taking it over the $10,000 limit, so is no longer included on the leaderboard
• Took 1,024 attempts at each task, writing about 137 pages of text for each attempt, or about 43 million words total

1. ^{^}

   OpenAI have stated that the newly-released o3 is not the same one as was evaluated on ARC-AGI-1 in December

I subscribe to new posts from someone, and I got this in the notification dropdown

In the email notification it did have the full title in the subject

Though in the email notification, I would have liked it to have some context like "New post by a user you subscribe to: ", it just had the full post title as the subject, no other information

The Center for Global Development has a blog post from December talking about the vaccine rollout which I have been meaning to post on the EA forum with a summary and thoughts but in the meantime here is an AI-assisted overview:

Key Takeaways:

• The Opportunity: Two new malaria vaccines (RTS,S and R21) are a major scientific breakthrough. Gavi currently plans to vaccinate 52 million children by 2030, potentially saving 180,000 lives.
• The Gap: However, under current slow rollout plans, ~2.5 million children will still die from malaria unvaccinated by 2030. Faste

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Global Burden of Disease (GBD) often has higher estimates for Malaria deaths than the WHO.

For instance in 2021, the WHO estimated 619,000 deaths globally from Malaria, whereas IHME had 748,000

There is a comparison (and much more other interesting data) on the Our World in Data Malaria page

It seems like the same co-author can be added several times to one post:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XfMkkbzKuK6vLKinC/the-road-from-human-level-to-superintelligent-ai-may-be

It's in the linked-to Google doc, but there is a proper podcast feed for this now:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rob-wiblins-top-recommended-econtalk-episodes-v0-2-feb-2020/id1538606917

Just discovered he was on the ever-excellent Rationally Speaking podcast:

https://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/220-tough-choices-on-privacy-and-artificial-intelligence-peter-eckersley/

And my bo(tec)

Great write-up!

About the Vestergaard PFAS story, GiveWell did make a comment here

This question has troubled me as well, plus the idea that once you get a high-impact job, if it turns out not to be a perfect fit, there are transaction costs to the organisastion replacing you with a better candidate

I don't think it's necessary for EA to denounce Musk on the basis that apart from a vague endorsement of a book a few years back and some general comments on AI safety which run in the opposite direction to his actual actions, he doesn't seem to be associated with EA at all

I think you are downplaying Musk's (historic) association with EA, he was a speaker at EA Global 2015, and donated at least $10m to FLI's AI safety research grants (both mentioned at this link)

This section from Tu Youyou's Wikipedia page is incredible:

As Tu also presented at the project seminar, its preparation was described in a recipe from a 1,600-year-old traditional Chinese herbal medicine text titled Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One's Sleeve. At first, it was ineffective because they extracted it with traditional boiling water. Tu discovered that a low-temperature extraction process could be used to isolate an effective antimalarial substance from the plant; Tu says she was influenced by the source, written in 340 by Ge Hong, which state

Two notification-related suggestions:

1. I would like to be able to "middle click" on individual notifications to open them in new tabs. At the moment I believe you can only single click on them to open them in the current tab. This middle click behaviour does exist on LessWrong

2. Related to this:

   1. Click on a new comment notification (it opens in your current tab)
   2. Scroll around on the page as you normally would
   3. Click on the bell notification icon
   4. As you hover over the notification that you originally clicked on, it shifts the focus of the page to that comment

   Is that the intended behaviour? I find it quite jarring 

What is the difference between this post and your previous one?

What about this current administration and possible TAI is the failure? Is orthogonal to American 'democracy' as outlined in the post?

Here is an online version of the book annotated by the author:

https://deepness.trmm.net/c00b/

Screwworm is a flesh-eating maggot!

I skimmed past many posts like this, assuming that it was some kind of stomach worm, or related to the suffering of wild worms (not that I am opposed to either of those, they just don't grab my attention as strongly)

Google Sheets also has a criminally under appreciated tool - Google App Script

You can write custom code, as Javascript, and have it run on a schedule, or as a function in a spreadsheet cell, or as a clickable menu item

Re: Possible investment strategies there is a dialogue on LessWrong from November 2023 which I think still holds up. Quoting from the takeaways:

Invest like 50% of my portfolio into pretty broad index funds with really no particular specialization

• Take like 20% of my portfolio and throw it into some more tech/AI focused index fund. Maybe look around for something that covers some of the companies listed here on the brokerage interface that is presented to me (probably do a bit more research here)
• Invest like 3-5% of my portfolio into each of Nvidia, TSMC, Mic

I agree with Greg that I'm not sure how causal that all was, as Vitalik says on the 80000 hours podcast:

Yeah. And when I got the Shiba tokens in 2021, I fully identified as EA then, and I was fully on board with defending the EAs against all of the various Twitter criticism. But at the same time, if you look at where I gave those donations, it was just a pretty broad spray across a bunch of things — the largest share of which basically had to do with global public health

(emphasis mine)

And as for the timing, in that same podcast episode he says:

What ended u

Well put! I will add that the competition includes companies like Amazon creating their own chips and others designing silicon specialised for inference (like Groq (not to be confused with xAI's model Grok))

I got an email from the IDC yesterday saying that they received "over 130 submissions" which is far fewer than I expected.

People who made a submission based on this post are a meaningful portion of all those who engaged with this process!

You might find this post interesting, which covered this and 3 other similar recent economics papers