Effective Altruism Forum

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Selected posts to help us answer: How can we do the most good with our resources?

Curated

CCF: As more money arrives, the best place to give keeps moving

Rethink Priorities·3d ago·8m read

Instrumental convergence is incoherent (so pls slightly lower your p(extinction))

Arepo·2d ago·24m read

It’s time for frontier AI staff to reassess their work: 8 strategic updates | Rob Wiblin

80000_Hours·3d ago·14m read

What to sort out before the money lands

Jack Lewars·4d ago·9m read

Give to a Goal - the case for “Big Goal” social change

Andrew Youn·4d ago·5m read

Popular comments and quick takes

RyanCarey's Quick takes

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RyanCarey

6d*

203

The new EA Forum frontpage layout is unserious. My concern is simple: where is the list of the latest posts? The screen is so overwhelmed by "featured posts" and "comments" and "quick takes" that the centerpiece of the whole thing is completely gone. Now I can't see what is going on in EA, or whether there is something that I want to read, which defeats the point of visiting the website. And moreover, hiding such key information gives the appearance of a forum that doesn't care about supporting serious discussion, it sets the wrong tone for the community.

You can see a comparison to LessWrong and Hacker News below.

Current EA forum

Current Lesswrong

Current Hacker News

Sanjana Iyer's Quick Takes

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Sanjana Iyer

Quick reflections from EAG NYC:

People in econ academia are worried about the lack of urgency and adaptability amongst peers who hopped on the econ of AI bandwagon, and think there is an overemphasis of empirical work and causal inference on marginal problems (like productivity gains) to impress other economists. Economists aren't rewarded for trying to answer ill defined but important / ambitious / longterm questions about AI e.g. gradual disempowerment, post-labour.
Some technical AI safety people are disillusioned with mech interp and are trying to work in AI policy because they think this is the going to move the needle most now.
1-1 system using the new Swapcard matcher is great, very low friction way to meet specific people where you know there's a high chance the conversation will be very fruitful.
The number and quality of my match requests were starkly higher from EAG London a few months ago, almost certainly due to MATS being on my profile.
I've gotten to the stage where now undergrads match with me for advice (I'm no longer the student!), and they're confused about what to do. I tell them is to remain relentlessly curious but I have no good advice for what the world looks like in 3 years.
People are increasingly supportive of when I say I put off PhD plans partially due to shorter timelines.
People don't have a good pitch to explain gradual disempowerment risks to their non AGI-pilled friends, as it's fuzzier/less obvious than misuse and misalignment. They seemed to like the cattle analogy I overuse.
Fellowship hopping beyond 2 fellowships is seen as an anti-signal in the AI safety space.

Cat🔸's Quick Takes

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Cat🔸

I think so much of the PR problem EA has just comes down to people hating EA for the same reason people hate philosophers:

people want clarity in a chaotic world, but philosophers often poses more questions than answers (like how EA itself is an open question)
populism is really popular right now, but philosophers are technocrats in ivory towers (like the memetic associations EA has with ivy league educations, silicon valley, etc.)
there's a lot more noise about what EA thinks rather than what EA does, aligning with the stereotype that philosophers don't do anything to apply their ideas in the real world.

I think the solution here is to just keep hammering in what EA has done, rather than engaging on what EA thinks. Most people's only knowledge of what EA has done is SBF, because that's all that gets talked about. Anecdotally, my friends' impressions of EA were most improved by learning that:

EA did a lot of pandemic risk preparation before COVID, and is part of the reason why the COVID vaccine came out as quickly as it did (Also really good if people start asking about why EA is investing in AI safety)
EA has gotten people to donate >2 billion to save >300k lives through GiveWell alone
(for leftist friends) EA supports a lot of direct money transfers to people in the global south, allowing for local entrepreneurship
(depends on the audience) EA is one of the reasons why so many countries are now emphasizing cage-free eggs, so chickens don't die in their own feces

Counterfactual 2:1 match for $250k in animal welfare donations on October 22nd

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Daniele Vassallo

Thanks for sharing this opportunity!

I found a few more EA-aligned animal welfare organizations that appear eligible based on Every.org's official criteria:

JoelMcGuire's Quick takes

I've started a living literature review on the relationship between wealth and wellbeing.

Things I've done some work on that I plan to publish more on that seem relevant to some EA conversations in global health and wellbeing :

Does each doubling have the same return to wellbeing? The convention (outside of time discounts) is to assume that going from $500 to $1000 is the same return on wellbeing as $500k to $1,000k. I think that's probably not true. This affects how we think about improving incomes in high versus low income countries.
How effective are cash transfers in high income countries? So far, it seems like cash transfers that improve annual income by 10-30% in the USA have pretty much no effect on wellbeing. Weird. Not sure why yet. Seems bearish for UBI, but I'm not quite sure what's a better idea yet.
Does economic growth make countries happier? Richer countries are happier, richer people are happier, and people getting richer are happier, but countries getting richer has reportedly been a more mixed blessing for people. I expect to find something like growth is probably good but less good than you would expect based on looking at country cross sections. However, it's possible there's some weird scale use stuff that'd make growth look growth look like a miracle for human wellbeing.
If not growth in incomes, then what? I'll look at what if any reliable predictors there are of increases to national wellbeing -- an area I feel like we know surprisingly little about. There's some work suggesting that increases to social capital and social spending are better predictors than economic growth. Something like social capital seems plausible but social spending seems likelier to be confounded by the requirement that you need to make money to spend money (on welfare systems). But there's some evidence that trust and social capital is increased in societies that experience high growth, so it's all a bit messy.

Some less relevant things I'll work on: what does the causal evidence say about social media and mental wellbeing? -- it's somewhat bad, probably. How happy were our ancestors? -- Either about as happy as we are or, or as happy as people are in Afghanistan -- Which is to say teetering on the cusp of having negative wellbeing on average. Not sure which yet. Is it the psychology, stupid? I'm also curious to understand the psychology of populism, and if a non-material lens gives us a better sense of how to predict and maybe prevent populist driven destablization to the institutions we'll need to preserve to have any chance at governing during these wacky next few decades.

How to mitigate the harm caused by veganism?

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Moral Weight Watcher

4d*

It may well correlate but as Heather Browing puts it we are just "trading intutions". Values "vary widely from 0.56 to 6.05" and the only comparable low income group from IDinsight Beneficiary Preferences Survey puts it at 0.56. Revealed preferences go against this as well with suicide rate in Afghanistan lower than the global average (Although that is a bad measure it alot of ways)

Often its just worth considering that EA Wild Animal folks are massively skewed in their moral weights for suffering often to basically weighting positive experiences at near zero. AIM has some data comparing Excruciating pain to Annoying between community surveys and the literature. For the literature showing trade off people would make the ratio is more like 1 : 30 while the comunity survey is 1 : 4.5 million and Anima international folks are even more skewed at 1 : 200 million. So much of the discussion is coming from a group with very different prefences to the general population. And we don't even know what non-humans would say about this!

At 1 : 30 and a death by predation of a minute even a relatively short life can look overall worth living, at 1 :200 million for the same death even a life of 300 years looks net negative.

So a normal trade offs of pain severity, positive experiences and other goods freedom may go to explain the assocation between animal rights and pro-rewilding

What to sort out before the money lands

Jack Lewars·4d ago·9m read

Give to a Goal - the case for “Big Goal” social change

Andrew Youn·4d ago·5m read

Coefficient Giving Career Transition Grant Q&As from three biosecurity grantees

Harry Gray·5d ago·14m read

Your work at [large AI safety ecosystem org] is not replaceable

brentonmayer·1w ago·6m read

EA Implications Of Being In An AGI Simulation

Ariel Simnegar 🔸·1w ago·9m read

ML4Good Impact Assessment

Jack_S🔸, Nia🔸, Linda Broglio, Imaan Khadir 🔸·1w ago·15m read

Robustness: Backfire Risks in AI Safety and Governance

Dawn Drescher·1w ago·51m read

Sanku: from 7 million to ~70 million people in three years — what we’ve learned and what it would take to scale much further

Rickard Vikstrom, Felix Brooks-church·1w ago·15m read

Selected posts to help us answer: How can we do the most good with our resources?

Popular comments and quick takes

JoelMcGuire's Quick takes

I've started a living literature review on the relationship between wealth and wellbeing.

Things I've done some work on that I plan to publish more on that seem relevant to some EA conversations in global health and wellbeing :

Does each doubling have the same return to wellbeing? The convention (outside of time discounts) is to assume that going from $500 to $1000 is the same return on wellbeing as $500k to $1,000k. I think that's probably not true. This affects how we think about improving incomes in high versus low income countries.
How effective are cash transfers in high income countries? So far, it seems like cash transfers that improve annual income by 10-30% in the USA have pretty much no effect on wellbeing. Weird. Not sure why yet. Seems bearish for UBI, but I'm not quite sure what's a better idea yet.
Does economic growth make countries happier? Richer countries are happier, richer people are happier, and people getting richer are happier, but countries getting richer has reportedly been a more mixed blessing for people. I expect to find something like growth is probably good but less good than you would expect based on looking at country cross sections. However, it's possible there's some weird scale use stuff that'd make growth look growth look like a miracle for human wellbeing.
If not growth in incomes, then what? I'll look at what if any reliable predictors there are of increases to national wellbeing -- an area I feel like we know surprisingly little about. There's some work suggesting that increases to social capital and social spending are better predictors than economic growth. Something like social capital seems plausible but social spending seems likelier to be confounded by the requirement that you need to make money to spend money (on welfare systems). But there's some evidence that trust and social capital is increased in societies that experience high growth, so it's all a bit messy.