It is common in EA circles to compare deaths counts from some systemic problem to deaths from war. The implication is often that "actually war isn't that bad if you just look at the numbers". The latest being Bentham's Bulldog in an otherwise good article on Nestlé's harmful practices with baby formula (he doesn't say anything about war not being that bad though).

I wish that this would stop because deaths aren't the only thing that matters. Below follow a number of claims that are based on my personal impression, not actual sources. 

Injury and disability. Generally much more common than death, and the ratio of injury:deaths varies a lot per problem. (Admittedly, baby formula in poor countries seems to have a high disability burden)

Trauma and grief. All deaths are grieved. But violent deaths tend to create a lot of trauma in the people around them, including from fleeing/displacement and separation of families and social ties.

Economic harm. This is the big one. It sounds cold, but I think the emotional response people have to war footage is actually quite appropriate because of the economic harm. War creates enormous economic harm through the destruction of infrastructure, the displacement of people, and the prevention of (foreign) investment and productive activity. People lose their jobs, become refugees, don't build productive skills, stop education, businesses don't get started, etc etc. 

Cultural effects & institutions. I suspect that war reduces the likelihood of tolerant, liberal democratic cultural norms and institutions developing. Instead, I'd expect vengeful, and extractive systems to become more likely.

Overall, I don't think deaths are a good proxy for the total harm of war when compared to other causes.

Apparently, your recommended course of action is unlikely to be effective according to this lawyer who seems to know what he's talking about (and cares about preventing this legislative change). He describes a more tractable course of action

Worth noting that that $37.8B figure of the founders pledges worth is based on their $380B valuation from their February fundraise. Current secondary markets value Anthropic much more highly, e.g. Ventuals (speculative valuation futures market) at $850B^[1] would make those pledges alone worth $85B. Add in EA-aligned and -adjacent investors as well as employees, and the potential for further increase in value, and we are looking at $100-200B worth of pledged/intended donations. This is an insane amount of philanthropic money.

Besides your point about limited grantmaking and project capacity, I'd like to make two others: 
- As the Transformer piece notes, all this money will have a significant pro-Anthropic bias
- None of the founders' pledges are legally binding. I've previously proposed that this might be a worthwhile project to make it so, but it's obviously a sensitive subject.

There's also the OpenAI Foundation, with a net worth of 25.8% of OpenAI, currently ~$220 billion. Their recent hiring of Jacob Trefethen as Life Sciences Lead, formerly at Coefficient Giving, makes me hopeful that at least some of that money will be reasonably well-spent, even if not on AI safety.

1. ^{^}

   There are some concerns about the reliability of this platform's price. But OpenAI's recent $850B valuation was ~28x their Annual Recurring Revenue, and Anthropic's recent ARR was $30B which at the same multiple would put them in the same ballpark. In any case, my general point remains that the actual pledged amount could become significantly larger than $37.8B

Thanks, fixed the link

It seems like a worthwhile project to ask/pressure Anthropic's founders to make their pledges legally binding. 

Anthropic's founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Ozzie Gooen estimates that in a few years this could be worth >$40 billion.

As Ozzie writes, adherence to the Giving Pledge (the Gates one) is pretty low: only 36% of deceased original pledgers met the 50% commitment. It's hard to follow through on such commitments, even for (originally) highly morally motivated people.

This study suggests that, if done well, LLMs can estimate effect sizes of drugs fairly accurately based on online reports. 

Sounds like this would benefit from this method of analyzing online anecdotes to estimate effect sizes, which showed good results in early data and is being expanded: 

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~nikita/natural/ 

There's advantages to play money, such as that players don't care as much about the time value of money (it's also much easier to start and resolve markets, leading to many more markets)

I sometimes think of this idea and haven't found anyone mentioning it with a quick AI search: a tax on suffering.

EDIT: there's a paper on this but specific to animal welfare that was shared on the forum earlier this year.

A suffering tax would function as a Pigouvian tax on negative externalities—specifically, the suffering imposed on sentient beings. The core logic: activities that cause suffering create costs not borne by the actor, so taxation internalizes these costs and incentivizes reduction.

This differs from existing approaches (animal welfare regulations, meat taxes) by:

• Making suffering itself the tax base rather than proxies like carbon emissions or product type
• Creating a unified framework across different contexts (factory farming, research, entertainment, etc.)
• Explicitly quantifying and pricing suffering

The main problems are measurement & administration. I would imagine an institute would be tasked with guidelines/a calculation model, which could become pretty complex. Actually administrating it would also be very hard, and there should be a threshold beneath which no tax is required because it wouldn't be worth the overhead. I would imagine that an initial version wouldn't right away be "full EA" taking into account invertebrates. It should start with a narrow scope, but with the infrastructure for moral circle expansion.

It's obviously more a theoretical exercise than practical near-term, but here's a couple of considerations: 

• it's hard to oppose: it's easier to say that carbon isn't important or animals don't suffer. It's harder to oppose direct taxation of suffering
• it's relatively robust in the long-term: it can incorporate new scientific and philosophical insights on wild animal welfare, non-vertebrate sentience, digital sentience, etc.
• it's scale sensitive
• it focuses the discussion on what matters: who suffers how much?
• It incentivizes the private sector to find out ways to reduce suffering

What are the latest growth metrics of the EA community? Or where can I find them? (I searched but couldn't find them)