All of Sjlver's Comments + Replies

There is now also a translation into Toki Pona.

For European people on a budget, here's a multivitamin at €0.07 per day: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Multivitamins-Minerals-Multivitamin-Essential-Vitamins/dp/B08BX439HX They don't deliver to the US, though. And you might want to add in some omega 3 fatty acids (DHA/EPA) for a more complete supplementation

What you write is almost right, but not 100%... we are getting at the heart of the problem here. Thanks for making me re-think this and state it more clearly!

Edited to add: I've now also read the discussion that you've linked to in your comment. It is now clear to me that the team has thought through issues like this... so I wouldn't be angry if you prefer to use your time more wisely than for responding to my ramblings :)

Assume as an example that, without my vote, there is the following situation:

• candidate A received 933 points from other voters
• candida

Thanks for setting up this donation election!

Choosing voting methods is difficult, and no voting method is without flaw. Nevertheless, I am somewhat unhappy with the method proposed here, because it is very difficult for users to support multiple candidates. The problem arises because the method tried to do two things: (1) determine which candidates are in the top three, and (2) determine their relative popularity.

The problem: as a voter who likes two candidates A and B, I cannot support A without harming B, and vice versa. My rational behavior is to alloc... (read more)

This is very well written. Thanks! It's the kind of article that sparks (my) curiosity.

I looked for some information on Helvetas' website. Helvetas is a Swiss charity that has been running safe water interventions for about 50 years; they are funded by private donors, but also receive development aid money from the Swiss government.

Helvetas provides some ideas why water interventions might help, besides diarrhea:

• Disproportionally helps women and girls: Women and girls in poor communities often spend several hours a day fetching water => big opportunit

Thanks! I completely understand... putting these systems in place can be time-consuming, and the regulations differ for each country.

I hope you'll find great US/Canada candidates!

PS, but only tangentially related: I've recently documented the situation of someone working in Germany for an international organization, at https://blog.purpureus.net/posts/how-to-work-in-germany-for-a-foreign-organization/

This sounds interesting, thanks for posting!

I noted that the application is open to candidates in the US or Canada. Is that a strict requirement, or could you make exceptions?

Here are some reasons why I think that units of ~100 households are ideal. The post itself has more examples.

• It's best for detailed planning. There is a type of humanitarian/development work that tries to reach every household in a region. Think vitamin A supplementation, vaccination programs, bednet distributions, cash transfers, ... For these, one typically needs logistics per settlement, such as a contact person/agent/community health worker, some means of transportation, a specific amount of bednets/simcards/..., etc.

  Of course, the higher levels of

Thanks! This seems very relevant. I will try to contact the team.

Yes, I know about What Three Words. Thanks for the suggestion! It's a good opportunity to clarify the different aims of my project and W3W.

W3W is essentially the same as a GPS coordinate, except more memorable and easier to pronounce. A W3W place does not necessarily correspond to anything particular in the real world (like a settlement). Thus, W3W does not provide any added value for planning purposes.

There are some other downsides, such as W3W being proprietary and based on (IMO) bad design choices (e.g., hard to localize).

A better alternative to W3W is... (read more)

Prediction markets haven't moved all that much yet: https://manifold.markets/bcongdon/will-a-cell-cultured-meat-product-b

But I share your hopeful attitude :)

I find this an interesting discussion, and hope that it will continue.

My own knowledge of this domain is very limited. I'll just mention some points from World Without End (WWE)... not because I endorse them, but to keep the discussion going:

• Because of low energy density, wind and solar require 1-2 orders of magnitude more land use, metal, and concrete per kWh than nuclear power. EROEI (Energy returned on energy invested) is worse.
• If batteries are used, the numbers become even worse; also greenhouse has emissions go up. WWE claims nuclear electricity em

Thanks for the write-up, Michelle! You write about your "hope that other like-minded parents will share their lessons and suggestions", so I decided to contribute a few thoughts.

I'm currently working as a software engineer for the Against Malaria Foundation (50%) and caring for our one-year old (50%). My wife also has a 50%-job.

Work time: Compared to what Michelle and Abby wrote, I have reduced my work time more strongly after becoming a parent. It felt important to me to experience my child growing up and to personally care for it. I can have 30 more pro... (read more)

I really liked this... the post made me think, and will continue to do that for some time. It doesn't seem all that unrealistic to me 🤯

One little nit: you seem to write "century" when you mean "decade".

Thanks for the thoughts!

I think we are getting closer to the core of your question here: the relationship between cases of malaria (or severe malaria more specifically) and deaths. I think that it would indeed be good to know more about the circumstances under which children die from malaria, and how this is affected by various kinds of medical care.

The question might partially touch upon SMC. Besides preventing malaria cases, it could also have an effect on severity (I'm thinking of Covid vaccines as an analogy). That said, the case for SMC (as I understa... (read more)

Looks like I can confirm this. Relevant passages from Cissé et al (2006):

The study was designed to measure Malaria, not deaths:

The primary outcome measure was a comparison of the occurence of clinical malaria between children in the two study groups.

Children with positive malaria tests received treatment:

Malaria morbidity was monitored through home visits every week and by detection of study children who presented at one of three health centres in the study area. At each assessment, axillary temperature was measured, and if it was 37.5C or greater, o

I appreciate the thoughts! I'm going to think about this more thoroughly... but here's a quick guess about the low death numbers:

These trials involved measuring malaria prevalence in children. Presumably, children with a positive result would then get medication or be referred to a health center. Malaria is a curable disease, so this approach would save lives. Unfortunately, it's also quite likely that the child would not receive appropriate treatment in the absence of a diagnosis, due to lack of knowledge of the parents, distance to health facilities, etc.

Anyway, it's just a quick guess. Might be worth checking if the studies describe what happened to children with positive test results.

The Right-Fit Evidence group provides good resources related to this post. They publish guidance on what types of evidence implementers should collect to demonstrate and monitor the impact of their programs.

Notably, different types of evidence are ideal depending on the stage of a program. In the beginning, when there is lots of uncertainty about an intervention, a randomized controlled trial is great. At a later stage, when the program is scaling to many recipients, it is more important to monitor the program and ensure that the implementation is done wel... (read more)

That seems fair. I agree that my request for an estimate is a big, maybe even unreasonable, request.

I asked because I am wondering if there really is enough reason to doubt the results of existing SMC trials. If I understand your post correctly, your main worry is not about actual errors in the trials; we don't have concrete reasons to believe they are wrong. Indeed, the trials provide high-quality evidence that SMC reduces malaria cases, including severe cases.

Your worries seem to be that (1) studies are underpowered to quantify reduction in malaria deat... (read more)

Yes, absolutely.

As far as I can tell, that type of RCT indeed is not being done. I don't know much about research on SMC specifically, but Givewell reports the following quote of Christian Lengeler, author of Cochrane Review of insecticide-treated bed nets:

To the best of my knowledge there have been no more RCTs with treated nets. There is a very strong consensus that it would not be ethical to do any more. I don't think any committee in the world would grant permission to do such a trial.

Thanks for these thoughts!

A question: How large do you expect the effects of such a replication to be? Maybe you could estimate "a study of cost $x$ would lead to a change if effect size of $y$ with probability $z$" for some instances of $x,y,z$. That would help to estimate whether the study would, in expectation, be worth more than one life saved per 5000 dollars.

And an observation: I think it would be very difficult to get ethical approval for such a study. SMC is (according to current knowledge) an amazing intervention. Any controlled trial would require a cont... (read more)

Jonas here, AMF software engineer.

Thank you for your research! I would really like to publish more of AMF's PDM data to enable this kind of work. Unfortunately, we have to prioritize how we spend our time in the small AMF team, and this task hasn't made it to the top yet.

If you were interested in doing a more in-depth analysis (and have the time required for this) it might be good to let Rob (our CEO) know. This can help in prioritizing this type of task.

(disclaimer: I work for AMF, but this is my personal opinion)

Yes, we have to prioritize. No, life quality seems the wrong metric for prioritization.

A few practical responses to the challenge first: AMF funds bednets at the scale of countries or provinces, that is, a few million nets at a time. This allows for efficient distributions that leverage economies of scale. Prioritization takes a number of factors into account, such as malaria prevalence (which might have an effect on the bednet use rate). Life quality metrics are currently not a factor for priori... (read more)

Related job ad, but not by the forum team; feel free to remove if not appropriate

The Against Malaria Foundation is close to Finnish time zones and completely remote. It currently has employees in the UK, Germany, and South Africa. One employee is working part-time due to parenting. AMF is hiring for several roles.

Sleeping under a bednet or getting a malaria vaccine are optional activities; people are free to choose to do that or not. (This is not quite accurate for children, where the decision probably lies with their caretakers.)

In post-distribution surveys, AMF consistently finds that most nets are being used as intended. People know that the nets protect against malaria. They also know the sickness, probably had it before, probably know someone who died from it. So it's an informed choice.

Based on this kind of observation, it seems to me that most people want to... (read more)

People should be allowed to destroy the button (aka "x-risk reduction") ;-)

In my previous job, we used the technique described below to prioritize feature requests and estimate their relative value. Feel free to skip this comment if you're not interested in slightly related survey techniques.

• Show a random sample of five items to a survey participant
• Participant selects the most important and least important (leaving three items "somewhere in-between")
• Repeat

Each iteration creates six links between items (A > B, A > C, A > D, B > E, C > E, D > E) plus, transitively, A > E. After enough iterations, a prefer... (read more)

Hi, would you be interested in AMF's software engineer positions? We have Python-based data analysis tasks that you might find fun, and I bet you could pick up the rest of the tech stack quickly. I came to AMF from a similar background as you (Python/C++ @ Google) and found that many of the skills translated well into the new environment.

Maybe check out the Operations Manager positions at AMF?

AMF is hiring software engineers. Our tech-stack is a bit more Microsoft-centric than your skills (using dotnet core, SQL server, ...) but I guess you could quickly pick up new skills and be effective. I came from a quite similar background as you when I joined AMF.

Thanks a lot for writing this up! This post contains many good thoughts; for example, I was intrigued by the thought that how we treat animals today might matter to how AI treats us in the future.

This post reminded me strongly of "How to create a vegan world" by Tobias Leenaert. In that book, Tobias argues that all progress toward veganism matters, be it people who reduce their meat consumption, the availability of good meat alternatives, moral progress, etc. Tobias compares the road to a vegan world with a long, stony, uphill path to a mountaintop. He say... (read more)

Thanks for pointing out these two places!

You seem much more confident than I am that work on AI that is unrelated to AI safety is in fact negative in sign.

Work on AI drives AI risk. This is not equally true of all AI work, but the overall correlation is clear. There are good arguments that AI will not be aligned by default, and that current methods can produce bad outcomes if naively scaled up. These are cited in your problem profile. With that in mind, I would not say that I'm confident that AI work is net-negative... but the risk of negative outcomes... (read more)

I appreciate the response, and I think I agree with your personal view, at least partially. "AI capabilities are racing forward regardless" is a strong argument, and it would mean that AI safety's contribution to AI progress would be small, in relative terms.

That said, it seems that the AI safety field might be particularly prone to work that's risky or neutral, for example:

• Interpretability research: interpretability is a quasi-requirement for deploying powerful models. Research in this direction is likely to produce tools that increase confidence in AI

Thanks a lot for this profile!

It leaves me with a question: what is the possibility that the work outlined in the article makes things worse rather than better? These concerns are fleshed out in more details in this question and its comment threads, but the TL;DR is:

• AI safety work is difficult: there are lots of hypotheses, experiments are hard to design, we can't do RCTs to measure whether it works, etc. Thus, there is uncertainty even about the sign of the impact.
• AI safety work could plausibly speed up AI development, create information hazards, be us

Oh, society can delay death by a lot ^[1]. GiveWell computes that it only costs in the low 100s of dollars to delay someone's death by a year. I think this is something very meaningful to do, generates a lot of happiness, and eliminates a lot of suffering.

My original post is about how we could do even better, by doing work targeted at the far future, rather than work in the global health space.

But these abstract considerations aside: I'm sorry to hear about the death of your mother and the Parkinson in your family. It is good to read that you seem to be cop... (read more)

It's an interesting question to what degree AI and related technologies will strengthen offensive vs defensive capabilities.

You seem to think that they strengthen offensive capabilities a lot more, leading to "ever larger threats". If true, this would be markedly different from other areas. For example, in information security, techniques like fuzz testing led to better exploits, but also made software a lot safer overall. In biosecurity, new technologies contribute to new threats, but also speed up detection and make vaccine development cheaper. Andy Webe... (read more)

Why do you think that?

Your philosophy implies (if I understand correctly) that we should be indifferent between being alive and dead, but I've never once encountered a person who was indifferent. That would have very strange implications. The concepts of happiness and suffering would be hard to define in such a philosophy...

If you want me to benefit from your answer, I think you'd need to explain a bit more what you mean, since the answer is so detached from my own experience. And maybe write more directly about the practical implications.

Thanks!

It's clear to me that I want to help people. I think my problem isn't that help is abstract. My current work is in global health, and it's a great joy to be able to observe the positive effects of that work.

My question is about what would be the best use of my time and work. I consider the possibility that this work should target improving the far future, but that kind of work seems intractable, indirect, conditional on many assumptions, etc. I'd appreciate good pointers to concrete avenues for improving the future that don't suffer from these problems. Helping old ladies and introspection probably won't help me with that.

Why do you think this is true?

Currently, only few organizations can build large AI models (it costs millions of dollars in energy, computation, and equipment). This will remain the case for a few years. These organizations do seem interested in AI safety research. A lot of things will happen before AI is so commonplace that small actors like "amateur civilian hacker boys" will be able to deploy powerful models. By that time, our capabilities for safety and defense will look quite different from today -- largely thanks to people working in AI safety now.

I t... (read more)

Cool! Thanks for the link to these papers. I'll study them.

Thank you. This is valuable to hear.

Maybe my post simplified things too much, but I'm actually quite open to learn about possibilities for improving the long term future, even those that are hard to understand or difficult to talk about. I sympathize with longtermism, but can't shake off the feeling that epistemic uncertainty is an underrated objection.

When it comes to your linked question about how near-termist interventions affect the far future, I sympathize with Arepo's answer. I think the effect of many such actions decays towards zero somewhat quickl... (read more)

I don't mean to set an unreasonably high bar. Sorry if my comment came across that way.

It's important to use the right counterfactual because work for the long-term future competes with GiveWell-style charities. This is clearly the message of 80000hours.org, for example. After all, we want to do the most good we can, and it's not enough to do better than zero.

Thanks a lot for your responses!

I share your sentiment: there must be some form of alignment work that is not speeding up capabilities, some form of longtermist work that isn't risky... right?

Why are the examples so elusive? I think this is the core of the present forum post.

15 years ago, when GiveWell started, the search for good interventions was difficult. It required a lot of research, trials, reasoning etc. to find the current recommendations. We are at a similar point for work targeting the far future... except that we can't do experiments, don't hav... (read more)

My point was that the alignment goal, from the human perspective, is an enslavement goal, whether the goal succeeds or not.

Really? I think it's about making machines that have good values, e.g., are altruistic rather than selfish. A better analogy than slavery might be raising children. All parents want their children to become good people, and no parent wants to make slaves out of them.

I'm coming back after thinking a bit more about improving human genes. I think there are three cases to consider:

1. Improving a living person, e.g., stem cell treatments or improved gut bacteria: These are firmly in the realm of near-term health interventions, and so we should compare their cost-effectiveness to that of bednets, vaccines, deworming pills etc. There is no first-order effect on the far future.

2. Heritable improvements: These are actually similar, since the number of people with a given gene stays constant in a stable population (women have t

(This is a separate reply to the "AI enslavement" point. It's a bit of a tangent, feel free to ignore.)

It's clear to me that the AI alignment problem is a robot-enslavement problem as well, but it's a trope, fairly obvious.

I don't follow. In most theories of AGIs, the AGIs end up smarter than the humans. Because of this, they could presumably break out of any kind of enslavement (cf. AI containment problem). It seems to me that an AGI world works only if the AGI is truly aligned (as in, shares human values without resentment for the humans). That's why I find it hard to envision a world where humans enslave sentient AGIs.

Thank you for this detailed reply. I really appreciate it.

I overall like the point of preventing harm. It seems that there are two kinds: (1) small harms like breaking a glass bottle. I absolutely agree that this is good, but I think that typical longtermist arguments don't apply here, because such actions do not have a lasting effect on the future. (2) large, irreversible harms like ocean pollution. Here, I think we are back to the tractability issues that I write about in the post. It is extremely difficult to reliably improve ocean health. Much of the w... (read more)