POLL: Is it OK to eat honey[1]? I've appreciated the Honey wars. We've seen the kind of earnest inquiry that makes EA pretty great.  I'm interested to see where the community stands here. I have so much uncertainty that I'm close to the neutral point, but I've been updated towards it maybe not being OK - I previously slurped the honey without a thought. What do you think[2]?     1. ^ This is a non-specific question. "OK" could mean a number of things (you choose). It could mean you think eating net honey is "net positive" (My pleasure/health > small chance of bee suffering), or could mean "does no harm at all", or even "Morally acceptable" - which might mean you think it does harm but you can offset it, or that the harm isn't bad enough for you to stop or anything along those lines.  2. ^ @Toby Tremlett🔹 said it was inappropriate for a poll not to have 2 footnotes so here it is...

Recently, various groups successfully lobbied to remove the moratorium on state AI bills. This involved a surprising amount of success while competing against substantial investment from big tech (e.g. Google, Meta, Amazon). I think people interested in mitigating catastrophic risks from advanced AI should consider working at these organizations, at least to the extent their skills/interests are applicable. This both because they could often directly work on substantially helpful things (depending on the role and organization) and because this would yield valuable work experience and connections. I worry somewhat that this type of work is neglected due to being less emphasized and seeming lower status. Consider this an attempt to make this type of work higher status. Pulling organizations mostly from here and here we get a list of orgs you could consider trying to work (specifically on AI policy) at: * Encode AI * Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) * Fairplay (Fairplay is a kids safety organization which does a variety of advocacy which isn't related to AI. Roles/focuses on AI would be most relevant. In my opinion, working on AI related topics at Fairplay is most applicable for gaining experience and connections.) * Common Sense (Also a kids safety organization) * The AI Policy Network (AIPN) * Secure AI project To be clear, these organizations vary in the extent to which they are focused on catastrophic risk from AI (from not at all to entirely).

A new study in The Lancet estimates that high USAID spending saved over 91 million lives in the past 21 years, and that the cuts will kill 14 million by 2030. They estimate high USAID spending reduced all-cause mortality by 15%, and by 32% in under 5s.

Good news! The 10-year AI moratorium on state legislation has been removed from the budget bill. The Senate voted 99-1 to strike the provision. Senator Blackburn, who originally supported the moratorium, proposed the amendment to remove it after concluding her compromise exemptions wouldn't work. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-senate-strikes-ai-regulation-085758901.html?guccounter=1 

Recently I got curious about the situation of animal farming in China. So I asked the popular AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) to do some research on this topic. I have put the result into a NotebookLM note here: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/071bb8ac-1745-4965-904a-d0afb9437682 If you have resources that you think I should include, please let me know.