Hi All, just seeing if there's a particular reason why development and growth for lower income countries is still lumped in with global health in the EA nomenclature (in the forums, the button only says "global health"!)
I think there's a lot of growing consensus that there is a lot of potential low hanging fruit that the EA community can do to increase growth in low and low middle income countries. By lumping these together it almost makes it seem that anything that is targeting these areas is only focused on health.
It would be good to see this distinction and more of a focus overall on global development priorities.
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At the entrance, you're greeted by a friendly volunteer who introduces themselves as Alex. They offer you a warm smile and kindly...
1. Tl;dr
Many reports indicate that indoor air quality (IAQ) interventions are likely to be effective at reducing respiratory disease transmission. However, to date there’s been very little focus on the workforce that will implement these interventions. I suggest that the US Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and building maintenance workforces have already posed a significant obstacle to these interventions, and broad uptake of IAQ measures will be significantly hindered by them in the future. The impact will vary in predictable ways depending on the nature of the intervention and its implementation. We should favor simple techniques with improved oversight and outsource or crosscheck technically complex work to people outside of the current HVAC workforce. We should also make IAQ conditions and devices as transparent as possible to both experts...
I appreciate this post, thanks for sharing it! I'm curating it. I should flag that I haven't properly dug into it (curating after a quick read), and don't have any expertise in this.
Another flag is that I would love to see more links for parts of this post like the following: "In an especially egregious example, one of the largest HVAC companies in the state had its Manual J submission admin go on vacation. The temporary replacement forgot to rename files and submitted applications named for their installed capacity (1 ton, 2 ton, 3 ton, etc.), revea...
When I first join Anne Nganga on our video call, she apologizes for the background noise of a fan running. “The weather here is hot and humid,” she says. “I have to have a fan or the AC on at all times if I am to enjoy being indoors.”
Anne is originally from Kenya, but she’s calling me from the island of Zanzibar, where she’s been facilitating the 2023 Effective Altruism Africa Residency Fellowship. It took place in the first three months of 2023, connecting EAs working on projects “addressing the most pressing problems in Africa”.
Residencies have become an increasingly popular option for Effective Altruism community building. They typically involve a group of people who work on Effective Altruism or related topics professionally working and living in the...
Welcome to the AI Safety Newsletter by the Center for AI Safety. We discuss developments in AI and AI safety. No technical background required.
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AI systems pose a variety of different risks. Renowned AI scientist Yoshua Bengio recently argued for one particularly concerning possibility: that advanced AI agents could pursue goals in conflict with human values.
Human intelligence has accomplished impressive feats, from flying to the moon to building nuclear weapons. But Bengio argues that across a range of important intellectual, economic, and social activities, human intelligence could be matched and even surpassed by AI.
How would advanced AIs change our world? Many technologies are tools, such as toasters and calculators, which humans use to accomplish our goals....
That’s a good point! Joe Carlsmith makes a similar step by step argument, but includes a specific step about whether the existence of rogue AI would lead to catastrophic harm. Would have been nice to include in Bengio’s.
Carlsmith: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353
This post was written by Simon Goldstein, associate professor at the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at ACU, and Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini, assistant professor at Rutgers University, for submission to the Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest. Both authors are currently Philosophy Fellows at the Center for AI Safety. This is a crosspost from LessWrong.
Abstract: Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to a new kind of AI architecture: the language agent. By repeatedly calling an LLM to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, language agents are able to function autonomously to pursue goals specified in natural language and stored in a human-readable format. Because of their architecture, language agents exhibit behavior that is predictable according to the laws of folk psychology: they have desires and beliefs, and...
Thanks Cameron. I think that I understand our differences in views. My understanding is that you argue that language agents might be a safe path (I am not sure I fully agree with this, but I am willing to be on board so far).
Our difference then is, as you say, in whether there are models which are not safe and whether this is relevant. In Section 5, on the probability of misalignment, and in your last comment, you suggest that it is highly likely that language agents are the path forward. I am not at all convinced that this is correct (e.g., I think that i...
Everything that looks like exponential growth eventually runs into limits and slows down. AI will quite soon run into limits of compute, algorithms, data, scientific progress, and predictability of our world. This reduces the perceived risk posed by AI and gives us more time to adapt.
Although I have a PhD in Computational Neuroscience, my experience with AI alignment is quite low. I haven’t engaged in the field much except for reading Superintelligence and listening to the 80k Hours podcast. Therefore, I may duplicate or overlook arguments obvious to the field or use the wrong terminology.
Many arguments I have heard around the risks from AI go a bit like this: We will build an AI that will be as smart as humans, then that AI will be able...
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CEARCH is currently researching hypertension and diabetes mellitus (type 2) as potentially impactful philanthropic cause areas. In particularly, we have identified taxes on sodium, as well as on sugar-sweetened beverages (i.e. soda), to be potentially extremely cost-effective interventions that the philanthropic community should support through the provision of additional funding and talent.
However, taxation does have the downside of reducing freedom of choice, and we are interested in getting the community's moral weights on the value of such freedom of choice (i.e. getting a sense of how bad we think this downside is, relative to the health benefits).
Hence, we would be grateful if the EA community (and indeed, the broader public) took the time to fill up this moral weights survey (perhaps 1-5 minutes of your time): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Wgszgv7u3PLBRYLd92hqoDrpj4DkdxU0cC0Y3bx0mHo/. This will directly inform our CEAs and our future recommendations to Charity Entrepreneurship, the donors we work with, and our partners in government and the policy advocacy space.
There's an "economic growth" topic on the EA Forum (under the parent topic of Global Health & Development). Is that distinct from what you mean by Global Development?
In a separate but related vein, are there any organizations / funds that are EA-aligned and working in this area?