How has the landscape of malaria prevention changed since you started? Especially since AMF alone has bought on the order of 100 million nets, which seems not insignificant compared to the total scale of the entire problem.

In the list at the top, Sam Hilton's grant summary is "Writing EA-themed fiction that addresses X-risk topics", rather than being about the APPG for Future Generations.

Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg's grant is listed as being $23,000, when lower down it's listed as $20,000 (the former is the amount consistent with the total being $471k).

Christiano operationalises a slow takeoff as

There will be a complete 4 year interval in which world output doubles, before the first 1 year interval in which world output doubles.

in Takeoff speeds, and a fast takeoff as one where there isn't a complete 4 year interval before the first 1 year interval.

The Double Up Drive, an EA donation matching campaign (highly recommended) has, in one group of charities that it's matching donations to:

• International Refugee Assistance Project
• Massachusetts Bail Fund
• StrongMinds

StrongMinds is quite prominent in EA as the mental health charity; most recently, Founders Pledge recommends it in their report on mental health.

The International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) works in immigration reform, and is a recipient of grants from OpenPhilanthropy as well as recommended for individual donors by an OpenPhil member of staff.

The Massachusetts Bail Fund, on the other hand, seems less centrally EA-recommended. It is working in the area of criminal justice reform, and posting bail is an effective-seeming intervention that I do like, but I haven't seen any analysis of its effectiveness or strong hints of non-public trust placed in it by informed donors (e.g. it has not received any OpenPhil grants; though note that it is listed in the Double Up Drive and the 2017 REG Matching Challenge).

I'd like to know more about the latter two from an EA perspective because they're both working on fairly shiny and high-status issues, which means that it would be quite easy for me to get my college's SU to make a large grant to them from the charity fund.

Is there any other EA-aligned information on this charity (and also on IRAP and StrongMinds, since the more the merrier)?

The sum of the grants made by the Long Term Future fund in August 2019 is $415,697. Listed below these grants is the "total distributed" figure $439,197, and listed above these grants is the "payout amount" figure $445,697. Huh?

Two people mentioned the CEA not being very effective as an unpopular opinion they hold; has any good recent criticism of the CEA been published?

You mention the Jhanas and metta meditation as both being immensely pleasurable experiences. Since these come from meditation, they seem like they might be possible for people to do "at home" at very little risk (save for the opportunity costs from the time investment). Do you have any thoughts on encouraging meditation aimed towards achieving these highly pleasurable states specifically as a cause area and/or something we should be doing personally?

In a building somewhere, tucked away in a forgotten corner, there are four clocks. Each is marked with a symbol: the first with a paperclip, the second with a double helix, the third with a trefoil, and the fourth with a stormcloud.

As you might expect from genre convention, these are not ordinary clocks. In fact, they started ticking when the first human was born, and when they strike midnight, a catastrophe occurs. The type depends on the clock, but what is always true is the disaster kills at least one in ten.

The times currently remaining on the clocks are:

• AI Clock: 3:00 to midnight
• Biotech Clock: 3:50 to midnight
• Nuclear Clock: 4:30 to midnight
• Climate Clock: 3:10 to midnight

Since there are many clocks, ticking somewhat randomly, they can be combined to estimate how long until at least one strikes midnight. 40 seconds of humanity.

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These numbers were calculated using the Metaculus community median predictions of the probability of 10% of people dying from each of the causes from the Ragnarök question series.

I took those values as a constant probability of extinction over a period of 81 years (sort of like what I brought up in my previous shortform post), and calculated the mean time until catastrophe given this.

I mapped 350,000 years (the duration for which anatomically modern humans have existed according to Wikipeda) to 24 hours.

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It is of course possible for human activity to push on the hands of these clocks, just as the clocks can influence humanity. An additional person working full time on those activities that would wind back the clocks could expect to delay them by this amount:

• AI Clock: 20,000 microseconds
• Biotech Clock: 200 microseconds
• Nuclear Clock: 30 microseconds
• Climate Clock: 20 microseconds

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And these were calculated even more tenuously, by taking 80,000 hours' order-of-magnitude guesses at how much of the problem an additional full-time worker would solve completely literally and then finding the difference in the Doomsday clock time for that.

This reminds me of the most important AMA question of all:

McAskill, would you rather fight 1 horse-sized chicken, or 100 chicken-sized horses?