You should volunteer at your first EAG! (Especially if you are a student or early career) * If you don’t have a network in EA, EAG’s can be overwhelming. Volunteering gives you a ready-made, organic network. * Volunteering is pretty chill - a lot of the shifts aren’t that hard. * At your first EAG, it’s unlikely that you are using your time so efficiently that a few hours of volunteering would cut into the value of your conference.

"On the Promotion of Safe and Socially Beneficial Artificial Intelligence" by @SethBaum from 2016

  I wanted to make this poll to see how the community views the speed/x-risk tradeoff. I'm personally 99% x-risk and 1% speed, so I would hard agree. My prediction is most people will agree, maybe a 70/30 split, but I'm curious to see.

We recently published an interview with Matthew Coleman - another entry in our Career Journeys series. Matthew is the Executive Director of Giving Multiplier, a platform that encourages donations to highly effective charities through donation matching. Before this, he completed a PhD in psychology, researching the psychology of altruism. The interview covers quite a lot of ground, but a few of the things we talked about include: * The gap between what a career looks like from the outside and what it's actually like day-to-day. * Advice for people wanting to make an impact through psychology. * The tension between keeping your options open and committing to a path. Here’s one of our favorite extracts from the full interview: On engaging with the (often mundane) realities of academic research: I learned a lot. By the time I started my lab manager role, I was fairly confident I wanted to do a PhD. But my research lab in undergrad, which I loved, was a very small lab where I was working closely with the faculty advisor, and I wanted to try out a larger lab studying different topics to explore a bit more. As the lab manager of an unusually large lab, I got a bird’s-eye view of a lot of the research projects going on and understood what the day-to-day looked like, whether that was grant applications, hiring and onboarding, or actually conducting research myself alongside my colleagues. I found the experience amazing and fascinating and really intellectually stimulating, which confirmed that I wanted to go the PhD route, so I followed through on my original plan from undergrad. […] I was certainly very fortunate to have gotten a lot of hands-on experience in research as an undergraduate, so I think I had a better sense of the day-to-day than many people do. But I do think it’s a very important point, and some related advice I like to give is: when you wake up on a random Tuesday in February, do you actually want to do the things that you have to do? Not just do y

LLM disclosure: used to search references, and to proofread in the end. Lighting has been getting ridiculously cheaper. And for the most part we seem to be not taking advantage of that positive externality: reducing crime through better lighting. This has been battle-tested as one of the effective ways for public security, see Chalfin, Hansen, Lerner & Parker (2022), an RCT in NYC public housing finding ~36% reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes from added street lighting. Many, many major cities still haven't copied this at the right levels! But we're also getting substantially negative externalities of bright lighting. Office buildings that never turn off their lights because why would they care. Apropos the new office building that just opened next to my housing. This may alimentate NIMBY spirits in me, God forbid. Kyba et al. (2017) document that Earth's artificially lit outdoor area grew 2.2% per year from 2012 to 2016, with the LED transition producing a rebound effect instead of getting savings. Jevons paradox and such. Also, this has all sorts of annoyances. I think malls, pharmacies, and hospitals have all become much brighter since my childhood. I may be more sensorially overloaded than most people, but this does meaningfully affect my qualia, so much that Pigou himself would collect taxes from the pharmacies with dozens and dozens of LEDs, while Coase would advocate that I have the natural property right of not being assaulted with that much lumen while buying a Tylenol. This does affect wellbeing of more than just me (Cho et al. 2015). But lightly enough, ha, to not be a topic of discussion.