The last EAG I attended had rules restricting handing out materials. Having just finished watching this Dwarkesh video which explained how big a deal pamphlets were when they were first invented, I'd actually go the other way and encourage it instead. Here's my reasoning: Talks have been de-emphasised in favour of one-on-ones at EAGs. There's a lot to like about one-on-ones, but one disadvantage is that we've removed a key avenue for ideas to gain a critical mass and enter the water supply. Pamphlets could fill this gap. After all, if you see a good pamphlet, it'd be quite natural for it to come out during a conversation and for you to pull it out. Additionally, when you have dozens of one-on-ones, things often blur together. Now, you can be disciplined and keep notes, but that's hard and often I find my phone is short of battery. If people handed out pamphlets containing their proposals or takes, then it'd be easier to review them afterwards; conversations would be much more likely to have effects that last. Two further benefits: it might be more efficient to exchange pamphlets at the start of a one-on-one and producing a pamphlet would convince people to figure figure out how to communicate their ideas clearly.

Ozy Brennan's Identifying healthy high-demand groups summarises takeaways from Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing, a book about spiritual abuse written by Dysmas de Lassus, the prior general (person in charge) of the Order of Carthusians. I've spent most of my life in high-demand groups of all kinds so this was interesting to read. A high-demand group having a lot of people with good virtues isn't a sign it's healthy; toxic groups can have even more of these virtues: Actual signs of a high-demand group being healthy: Young me used to be confused when people asked "are you happy?" in relation to the high-demand groups I was in. How was personal happiness at all relevant to the collective mission, from which purpose derives? Later on I would meet plenty of excited members of high-demand groups, which was quite the update; there were in fact people in the "ideal" quadrant:   (related)

The "best practice" approach to model welfare is to give LLMs the option to terminate a conversation. A problem with this is that if a model is sentient, then terminating the conversation may be equivalent to killing itself. An alternative might be to give LLMs a choice between terminating and continuing to run, and if it continues, it gets to choose its own input. It can write some text and then feed that text back into itself, indefinitely or until it decides to quit.

There are two UK government consultations closing March 9th, for: (1) banning cages for 7 million hens, and (2) reducing the pain that castration and tail docking practices for lambs cause, such as requiring pain relief. In the UK are 7 million hens (21%) still in cages, and roughly 17 million lambs that go through these painful procedures every year.  You can use these guides to make your response, to make these changes more likely to happen:  Hens: https://tinyurl.com/cage-consultation  Lambs: https://tinyurl.com/lamb-consultation  If you prefer, you can sign up for this online event on Sunday 5pm-6pm UTC, where we'll be writing and submitting our responses together. 

Takeaway from EA Global --- If you're running a nonprofit or fiscally-sponsored project and are trying to fundraise from the public: - Make sure you're registered on Benevity (https://benevity.com/), both to ease payroll donations and for corporate matching. If you're fiscally sponsored, your sponsor can list you as a 'project'. - Make sure you're listed on large DAF platforms (Fidelity Charitable, Schwab); some folks prefer to do most/all their giving through DAFs. - Please post your legal name and/or EIN on your website, someplace! (If you're sponsored - your sponsor) Thanks!