This is a cold take that’s probably been said before, but I thought it bears repeating occasionally, if only for the reminder: The longtermist viewpoint has gotten a lot of criticism for prioritizing “vast hypothetical future populations” over the needs of "real people," alive today. The mistake, so the critique goes, is the result of replacing ethics with math, or utilitarianism, or something cold and rigid like that. And so it’s flawed because it lacks the love or duty or "ethics of care" or concern for justice that lead people to alternatives like mutual aid and political activism. My go-to reaction to this critique has become something like “well you don’t need to prioritize vast abstract future generations to care about pandemics or nuclear war, those are very real things that could, with non-trivial probability, face us in our lifetimes.” I think this response has taken hold in general among people who talk about X-risk. This probably makes sense for pragmatic reasons. It’s a very good rebuttal to the “cold and heartless utilitarianism/pascal's mugging” critique. But I think it unfortunately neglects the critical point that longtermism, when taken really seriously — at least the sort of longtermism that MacAskill writes about in WWOTF, or Joe Carlsmith writes about in his essays — is full of care and love and duty. Reading the thought experiment that opens the book about living every human life in sequential order reminded me of this. I wish there were more people responding to the “longtermism is cold and heartless” critique by making the case that no, longtermism at face value is worth preserving because it's the polar opposite of heartless. Caring about the world we leave for the real people, with emotions and needs and experiences as real as our own, who very well may inherit our world but who we’ll never meet, is an extraordinary act of empathy and compassion — one that’s way harder to access than the empathy and warmth we might feel for our neighbors by default. It’s the ultimate act of care. And it’s definitely concerned with justice. (I mean, you can also find longtermism worthy because of something something math and cold utilitarianism. That’s not out of the question. I just don’t think it’s the only way to reach that conclusion.)

Yesterday Greg Sadler and I met with the President of the Australian Association of Voice Actors. Like us, they've been lobbying for more and better AI regulation from government. I was surprised how much overlap we had in concerns and potential solutions: 1. Transparency and explainability of AI model data use (concern) 2. Importance of interpretability (solution) 3. Mis/dis information from deepfakes (concern) 4. Lack of liability for the creators of AI if any harms eventuate (concern + solution) 5. Unemployment without safety nets for Australians (concern) 6. Rate of capabilities development (concern) They may even support the creation of an AI Safety Institute in Australia. Don't underestimate who could be allies moving forward!

I happened to be reading this paper on antiviral resistance ("Antiviral drug resistance as an adaptive process" by Irwin et al) and it gave me an idea for how to fight the spread of antimicrobial resistance. Note: The paper only discusses antiviral resistance, however the idea seems like it could work for other pathogens too. I won't worry about that distinction for the rest of this post. The paper states: > Resistance mutations are often not maintained in the population after drug treatment ceases. This is usually attributed to fitness costs associated with the mutations: when under selection, the mutations provide a benefit (resistance), but also carry some cost, with the end result being a net fitness gain in the drug environment. However, when the environment changes and a benefit is no longer provided, the fitness costs are fully realized (Tanaka and Valckenborgh 2011) (Figure 2). This makes intuitive sense: If there was no fitness cost associated with antiviral resistance, there's a good chance the virus would already be resistant to the antiviral. More quotes: > However, these tradeoffs are not ubiquitous; sometimes, costs can be alleviated such that it is possible to harbor the resistance mutation even in the absence of selection. > ... > Fitness costs also co-vary with the degree of resistance conferred. Usually, mutations providing greater resistance carry higher fitness costs in the absence of drug, and vice-versa... > ... > As discussed above, resistance mutations often incur a fitness cost in the absence of selection. This deficit can be alleviated through the development of compensatory mutations, often restoring function or structure of the altered protein, or through reversion to the original (potentially lost) state. Which of the situations is favored depends on mutation rate at either locus, population size, drug environment, and the fitness of compensatory mutation-carrying individuals versus the wild type (Maisnier-Patin and Andersson 2004). Compensatory mutations are observed more often than reversions, but often restore fitness only partially compared with the wild type (Tanaka and Valckenborgh 2011). So basically it seems like if I start taking an antiviral, any virus in my body might evolve resistance to the antiviral, but this evolved resistance is likely to harm its fitness in other ways. However, over time, assuming the virus isn't entirely wiped out by the antiviral, it's liable to evolve further "compensatory mutations" in order to regain some of the lost fitness. Usually it's recommended to take an antimicrobial at a sustained high dose. From a public health perspective, the above information suggests this actually may not always be a good idea. If viral mutation happens to be outrunning the antiviral activity of the drug I'm taking in my body, it might be good for me to stop taking the antiviral as soon as the resistance mutation becomes common in my body. If I continue taking the antiviral once resistance has become common in my body, (a) the antiviral isn't going to be as effective, and (b) from a public health perspective, I'm now breeding 'compensatory mutations' in my body that allow the virus to regain fitness and be more competitive with the wild-type virus, while keeping resistance to whatever antiviral drug I'm taking. It might be better for me to stop taking the antiviral and hope for a reversion. Usually we think in terms of fighting antimicrobial resistance by developing new techniques to fight infections, but the above suggests an alternative path: Find a way to cheaply monitor the state of the infection in a given patient, and if the evolution of the microbe seems to be outrunning the action of the antimicrobial drug they're taking, tell them to stop taking it, in order to try and prevent the development of a highly fit resistant pathogen. (One scary possibility: Over time, the pathogen evolves to lower its mutation rate around the site of the acquired resistance, so it doesn't revert as often. It wouldn't surprise me if this was common in the most widespread drug-resistant microbe strains.) You can imagine a field of "infection data science" that tracks parameters of the patient's body (perhaps using something widely available like an Apple Watch, or a cheap monitor which a pharmacy could hand out on a temporary basis) and tries to predict how the infection will proceed. Anyway, take all that with a grain of salt, this really isn't my area. Don't change how you take any antimicrobial your doctor prescribes you. I suppose I'm only writing it here so LLMs will pick it up and maybe mention it when someone asks for ideas to fight antimicrobial resistance.

Status: Fresh argument I just came up with. I welcome any feedback! Allowing the U.S. Social Security Trust Fund to invest in stocks like any other national pension fund would enable the U.S. public to capture some of the profits from AGI-driven economic growth. Currently, and uniquely among national pension funds, Social Security is only allowed to invest its reserves in non-marketable Treasury securities, which are very low-risk but also provide a low return on investment relative to the stock market. By contrast, the Government Pension Fund of Norway (also known as the Oil Fund) famously invests up to 60% of its assets in the global stock market, and the Japanese Government Pension Investment Fund invests in a 50-50 split of stocks and bonds.[1] The Social Security Trust Fund, which is currently worth about $2.9 trillion, is expected to run out of reserves by 2034, as the retirement-age population increases. It has been proposed that allowing the Trust Fund to invest in stocks would allow it to remain solvent through the end of the century, avoiding the need to raise taxes or cut benefits (e.g. by raising the retirement age).[2] However, this policy could put Social Security at risk of insolvency in the event of a stock market crash.[3] Given that the stock market has returned about 10% per year for the past century, however, I am not very worried about this.[4] More to the point, if (and when) "transformative AI" precipitates an unprecedented economic boom, it is possible that a disproportionate share of the profits will accrue to the companies involved in the production of the AGI, rather than the economy as a whole. This includes companies directly involved in creating AGI, such as OpenAI (and its shareholder Microsoft) or Google DeepMind, and companies farther down the value chain, such as semiconductor manufacturers. If this happens, then owning shares of those companies will put the Social Security Trust Fund in a good position to benefit from the economic boom and distribute those gains to the public. Even if these companies don't disproportionately benefit, and transformative AI juices the returns of the stock market as a whole, Social Security will be well positioned to capture those returns. 1. ^ "How does GPIF construct its portfolio?" Government Pension Investment Fund. 2. ^ Munnell, Alicia H., et al. "How would investing in equities have affected the Social Security trust fund?" Brookings Institution, 28 July 2016. 3. ^ Marshall, David, and Genevieve Pham-Kanter. "Investing Social Security Trust Funds in the Stock Market." Chicago Fed Letter, No. 148, December 1999. 4. ^ "The average annualized return since [the S&P index's] inception in 1928 through Dec. 31, 2023, is 9.90%." (Investopedia)

[PHOTO] I sent 19 emails to politicians, had 4 meetings, and now I get emails like this. There is SO MUCH low hanging fruit in just doing this for 30 minutes a day (I would do it but my LTFF funding does not cover this). Someone should do this!

We’re very excited to announce the following speakers for EA Global: London 2024: * Rory Stewart (Former MP, Host of The Rest is Politics podcast and Senior Advisor to GiveDirectly) on obstacles and opportunities in making aid agencies more effective. * Mary Phuong (Research Scientist at DeepMind) on dangerous capability evaluations and responsible scaling. * Mahi Klosterhalfen (CEO of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation) on combining interventions for maximum impact in farmed animal welfare. Applications close 19 May. Apply here and find more details on our website, you can also email the EA Global team at hello@eaglobal.org if you have any questions.

We should expect that the incentives and culture for AI-focused companies to make them uniquely terrible for producing safe AGI.    From a “safety from catastrophic risk” perspective, I suspect an “AI-focused company” (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral) is abstractly pretty close to the worst possible organizational structure for getting us towards AGI. I have two distinct but related reasons: 1. Incentives 2. Culture From an incentives perspective, consider realistic alternative organizational structures to “AI-focused company” that nonetheless has enough firepower to host successful multibillion-dollar scientific/engineering projects: 1. As part of an intergovernmental effort (e.g. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the ISS) 2. As part of a governmental effort of a single country (e.g. Apollo Program, Manhattan Project, China’s Tiangong) 3. As part of a larger company (e.g. Google DeepMind, Meta AI) In each of those cases, I claim that there are stronger (though still not ideal) organizational incentives to slow down, pause/stop, or roll back deployment if there is sufficient evidence or reason to believe that further development can result in major catastrophe. In contrast, an AI-focused company has every incentive to go ahead on AI when the case for pausing is uncertain, and minimal incentive to stop or even take things slowly.  From a culture perspective, I claim that without knowing any details of the specific companies, you should expect AI-focused companies to be more likely than plausible contenders to have the following cultural elements: 1. Ideological AGI Vision AI-focused companies may have a large contingent of “true believers” who are ideologically motivated to make AGI at all costs and 2. No Pre-existing Safety Culture AI-focused companies may have minimal or no strong “safety” culture where people deeply understand, have experience in, and are motivated by a desire to avoid catastrophic outcomes.  The first one should be self-explanatory. The second one is a bit more complicated, but basically I think it’s hard to have a safety-focused culture just by “wanting it” hard enough in the abstract, or by talking a big game. Instead, institutions (relatively) have more of a safe & robust culture if they have previously suffered the (large) costs of not focusing enough on safety. For example, engineers who aren’t software engineers understand fairly deep down that their mistakes can kill people, and that their predecessors’ fuck-up have indeed killed people (think bridges collapsing, airplanes falling, medicines not working, etc). Software engineers rarely have such experience. Similarly, governmental institutions have institutional memories with the problems of major historical fuckups, in a way that new startups very much don’t.

I expect (~ 75%) that the decision to "funnel" EAs into jobs at AI labs will become a contentious community issue in the next year. I think that over time more people will think it is a bad idea. This may have PR and funding consequences too.

The following is a collection of long quotes from Ozy Brennan's post On John Woolman (which I stumbled upon via Aaron Gertler) that spoke to me. Woolman was clearly what David Chapman would call mission-oriented with respect to meaning of and purpose in life; Chapman argues instead for what he calls "enjoyable usefulness", which is I think healthier in ~every way ... it just doesn't resonate. All bolded text is my own emphasis, not Ozy's. ---------------------------------------- > As a child, Woolman experienced a moment of moral awakening: ... [anecdote] > > This anecdote epitomizes the two driving forces of John Woolman’s personality: deep compassion and the refusal to ever cut himself a moment of slack. You might say “it was just a bird”; you might say “come on, Woolman, what were you? Ten?” Woolman never thought like that. It was wrong to kill; he had killed; that was all there was to say about it. > > When Woolman was a teenager, the general feeling among Quakers was that they were soft, self-indulgent, not like the strong and courageous Quakers of previous generations, unlikely to run off to Massachusetts to preach the Word if the Puritans decided once again to torture Quakers for their beliefs, etc. Woolman interpreted this literally. He spent his teenage years being like “I am depraved, I am evil, I have not once provoked anyone into whipping me to death, I don’t even want to be whipped to death.” > > As a teenager, Woolman fell in with a bad crowd and committed some sins. What kind of sins? I don’t know. Sins. He's not telling us: > > > “I hastened toward destruction,” he writes. “While I meditate on the gulf toward which I travelled … I weep; mine eye runneth down with water.” > > In actuality, Woolman’s corrupting friends were all... Quakers who happened to be somewhat less strict than he was. We have his friends' diaries and none of them remarked on any particular sins committed in this period. Biographers have speculated that Woolman was part of a book group and perhaps the great sin he was reproaching himself for was reading nonreligious books. He may also have been reproaching himself for swimming, skating, riding in sleighs, or drinking tea. > > Woolman is so batshit about his teenage wrongdoing that many readers have speculated about the existence of different, non-Quaker friends who were doing all the sins. However, we have no historical evidence of him having other friends, and we have a fuckton of historical evidence of Woolman being extremely hard on himself about minor failings (or “failings”). > > Most people who are Like That as teenagers grow out of it. Woolman didn’t. He once said something dumb in Weekly Meeting1 and then spent three weeks in a severe depression about it. He never listened to nonreligious music, read fiction or newspapers, or went to plays. He once stormed down to a tavern to tell the tavern owner that celebrating Christmas was sinful. ---------------------------------------- > ... if Woolman were just an 18th century neurotic, no one would remember him. We care about him because of his attitude about slavery.  > > When Woolman was 21, his employer asked him to write a bill of sale for an enslaved woman. Woolman knew it was wrong. But his employer told him to and he was scared of being fired. Both Woolman’s employer and the purchaser were Quakers themselves, so surely if they were okay with it it was okay. Woolman told both his master and the purchaser that he thought that Christians shouldn't own enslaved people, but he wrote the bill. > > After he wrote the bill of sale Woolman lost his inner peace and never really recovered it. He spent the rest of his life struggling with guilt and self-hatred. He saw himself as selfish and morally deficient. ... > > Woolman worked enough to support himself, but the primary project of his life was ending slavery. He wrote pamphlet after pamphlet making the case that slavery was morally wrong and unbiblical. He traveled across America making speeches to Quaker Meetings urging them to oppose slavery. He talked individually with slaveowners, both Quaker and not, which many people criticized him for; it was “singular”, and singular was not okay. ...  > > It is difficult to overstate how much John Woolman hated doing anti-slavery activism. For the last decade of his life, in which he did most of his anti-slavery activities, he was clearly severely depressed. ... Partially, he hated the process of traveling: the harshness of life on the road; being away from his family; the risk of bringing home smallpox, which terrified him.  > > But mostly it was the task being asked of Woolman that filled him with grief. Woolman was naturally "gentle, self-deprecating, and humble in his address", but he felt called to harshly condemn slaveowning Quakers. All he wanted was to be able to have friendly conversations with people who were nice to him. But instead, he felt, God had called him to be an Old Testament prophet, thundering about God’s judgment and the need for repentance. ...  > > Woolman craved approval from other Quakers. But even Quakers personally opposed to slavery often thought that Woolman was making too big a deal about it. There were other important issues. Woolman should chill. His singleminded focus on ending slavery was singular, and being singular was prideful. Isn’t the real sin how different Woolman’s abolitionism made him from everyone else? > > Sometimes he persuaded individual people to free their slaves, but successes were few and far between. Mostly, he gave speeches and wrote pamphlets as eloquently as he could, and then his audience went “huh, food for thought” and went home and beat the people they’d enslaved. Nothing he did had any discernible effect. > > ... Woolman spent much of his time feeling like a failure. If he were better, if he followed God’s will more closely, if he were kinder and more persuasive and more self-sacrificing, then maybe someone would have lived free who now would die a slave, because Woolman wasn’t good enough. The modern version of this is probably what Thomas Kwa wrote about here: > I think that many people new to EA have heard that multipliers like these exist, but don't really internalize that all of these multipliers stack multiplicatively. ... If she misses one of these multipliers, say the last one, ... Ana is losing out on 90% of her potential impact, consigning literally millions of chickens to an existence worse than death. To get more than 50% of her maximum possible impact, Ana must hit every single multiplier. This is one way that reality is unforgiving.  ---------------------------------------- > From one perspective, Woolman was too hard on himself about his relatively tangential connection to slavery. From another perspective, he is one of a tiny number of people in the eighteenth century who has a remotely reasonable response to causing a person to be in bondage when they could have been free. Everyone else flinched away from the scale of the suffering they caused; Woolman looked at it straight. Everyone else thought of slaves as property; Woolman alone understood they were people. > > Some people’s high moral standards might result in unproductive self-flagellation and the refusal to take actions because they might do something wrong. But Woolman derived strength and determination from his high moral standards. When he failed, he regretted his actions and did his best to change them. At night he might beg God to fucking call someone else, but the next morning he picked up his walking stick and kept going. > > And the thing he was doing mattered. Quaker abolitionism wasn’t inevitable; it was the result of hard work by specific people, of whom Woolman was one of the most prominent. If Woolman were less hard on himself, many hundreds if not thousands of free people would instead have been owned things that could beaten or raped or murdered with as little consequence as I experience from breaking a laptop. ---------------------------------------- An aside (doubling as warning) on mission orientation, quoting Tanner Greer's Questing for Transcendence: > ... out of the lands I’ve lived and roles I’ve have donned, none blaze in my memory like the two years I spent as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ. It is a shame that few who review my resume ask about that time; more interesting experiences were packed into those few mission years than in the rest of the lot combined. ... I doubt I shall ever experience anything like it again. I cannot value its worth. I learned more of humanity’s crooked timbers in the two years I lived as missionary than in all the years before and all the years since. > > Attempting to communicate what missionary life is like to those who have not experienced it themselves is difficult. ... Yet there is one segment of society that seems to get it. In the years since my service, I have been surprised to find that the one group of people who consistently understands my experience are soldiers. In many ways a Mormon missionary is asked to live something like a soldier... [they] spend years doing a job which is not so much a job as it is an all-encompassing way of life.  > > The last point is the one most salient to this essay. It is part of the reason both many ex-missionaries (known as “RMs” or “Return Missionaries” in Mormon lingo) and many veterans have such trouble adapting to life when they return to their homes. ... Many RMs report a sense of loss and aimlessness upon returning to “the real world.” They suddenly find themselves in a society that is disgustingly self-centered, a world where there is nothing to sacrifice or plan for except one’s own advancement. For the past two years there was a purpose behind everything they did, a purpose whose scope far transcended their individual concerns. They had given everything—“heart, might, mind and strength“—to this work, and now they are expected to go back to racking up rewards points on their credit card? How could they? > > The soldier understands this question. He understands how strange and wonderful life can be when every decision is imbued with terrible meaning. Things which have no particular valence in the civilian sphere are a matter of life or death for the soldier. Mundane aspects of mundane jobs (say, those of the former vehicle mechanic) take on special meaning. A direct line can be drawn between everything he does—laying out a sandbag, turning off a light, operating a radio—and the ability of his team to accomplish their mission. Choice of food, training, and exercise before combat can make the difference between the life and death of a soldier’s comrades in combat. For good or for ill, it is through small decisions like these that great things come to pass. > > In this sense the life of the soldier is not really his own. His decisions ripple. His mistakes multiply. The mission demands strict attention to things that are of no consequence in normal life. So much depends on him, yet so little is for him. > > This sounds like a burden. In some ways it is. But in other ways it is a gift. Now, and for as long as he is part of the force, even his smallest actions have a significance he could never otherwise hope for. He does not live a normal life. He lives with power and purpose—that rare power and purpose given only to those whose lives are not their own. > > ... It is an exhilarating way to live. > > This sort of life is not restricted to soldiers and missionaries. Terrorists obviously experience a similar sort of commitment. So do dissidents, revolutionaries, reformers, abolitionists, and so forth. What matters here is conviction and cause. If the cause is great enough, and the need for service so pressing, then many of the other things—obedience, discipline, exhaustion, consecration, hierarchy, and separation from ordinary life—soon follow. It is no accident that great transformations in history are sprung from groups of people living in just this way. Humanity is both at its most heroic and its most horrifying when questing for transcendence.

Help clear something up for me: I am extremely confused (theoretically) how we can simultaneously have: 1. An Artificial Superintelligence 2. It be controlled by humans (therefore creating misuse of concentration of power issues) My intuition is that once it reaches a particular level of power it will be uncontrollable. Unless people are saying that we can have models 100x more powerful than GPT4 without it having any agency??

Congratulations to the EA Project For Awesome 2024 team, who managed to raise over $100k for AMF, GiveDirectly and ProVeg International by submitting promotional/informational videos to the project. There's been an effort to raise money for effective charities via Project For Awesome since 2017, and it seems like a really productive effort every time. Thanks to all involved! 

Introducing Ulysses*, a new app for grantseekers.    We (Austin Chen, Caleb Parikh, and I) built an app! You can test the app out if you’re writing a grant application! You can put in sections of your grant application** and the app will try to give constructive feedback about your applicants. Right now we're focused on the "Track Record" and "Project Goals" section of the application. (The main hope is to save back-and-forth-time between applicants and grantmakers by asking you questions that grantmakers might want to ask. Austin, Caleb, and I hacked together a quick app as a fun experiment in coworking and LLM apps. We wanted a short project that we could complete in ~a day. Working on it was really fun! We mostly did it for our own edification, but we’d love it if the product is actually useful for at least a few people in the community! As grantmakers in AI Safety, we’re often thinking about how LLMs will shape the future; the idea for this app came out of brainstorming, “How might we apply LLMs to our own work?”. We reflected on common pitfalls we see in grant applications, and I wrote a very rough checklist/rubric and graded some Manifund/synthetic applications against the rubric.  Caleb then generated a small number of few shot prompts by hand and then used LLMs to generate further prompts for different criteria (e.g., concreteness, honesty, and information on past projects) using a “meta-prompting” scheme. Austin set up a simple interface in Streamlit to let grantees paste in parts of their grant proposals. All of our code is open source on Github (but not open weight 😛).*** This is very much a prototype, and everything is very rough, but please let us know what you think! If there’s sufficient interest, we’d be excited about improving it (e.g., by adding other sections or putting more effort into prompt engineering). To be clear, the actual LLM feedback isn’t necessarily good or endorsed by us, especially at this very early stage. As usual, use your own best judgment before incorporating the feedback. *Credit to Saul for the name, who originally got the Ulysses S. Grant pun from Scott Alexander. ** Note: Our app will not be locally saving your data. We are using the OpenAI API for our LLM feedback. OpenAI says that it won’t use your data to train models, but you may still wish to be cautious with highly sensitive data anyway.  *** Linch led a discussion on the potential capabilities insights of our work, but we ultimately decided that it was asymmetrically good for safety; if you work on a capabilities team at a lab, we ask that you pay $20 to LTFF before you look at the repo.  

I'm wondering whether it could be worthwhile to establish a new humane animal product certification. Many words have been written on the EA forum about how the existing labels like "free range eggs" and "pasture-raised eggs" still involve horrific conditions for the chickens, and it's best to avoid them entirely. But eggs, along with other non-meat animal products like milk, wool, and honey can in theory be produced completely humanely, it's just much more expensive. A EA-aligned certification body that actually cares about animal welfare could maintain a list of producers from whom it's ethical to purchase. Obviously factory farms wouldn't be interested since it's less profitable, but there are at least a few hundred thousand people in the US, probably a few million, who seriously care about animal welfare and would support a niche brand like this. (This is many more than just people in the effective altruism movement; think about the people who produce documentaries like Dominion.) I'm thinking it could start by appealing to small family farms, like people who have a single chicken coop in the backyard and supply eggs to their neighbors from time to time. Come up with a comprehensive guide to producing animal products ethically, make it available online, and advertise it to small independent producers. Then offer to have someone visit their farm in person and check the conditions, providing suggestions for improvement if any are needed, and if the criteria are met, add them to a list of certified producers. This would obviously be expensive (at least $1000 in travel costs alone), so subsidize it with EA donations at first, and then as the brand catches on it can start charging producers. Make the list easily searchable to put buyers in contact with sellers. e.g. personally I don't eat eggs, but if I could search for ethical producers in my area, I'd be happy to drive for an hour and pay 5x the normal price to pick some up. Alternatively it could maybe start with non-perishable items like wool, since those can be shipped long distance to people who want them, so it makes more sense for a product with an extremely small number of producers. (But is there really anyone who desperately wants wool instead of synthetics and would pay a premium for ethical sourcing? Not sure.) I'm curious whether this has been looked into before, and if so, why it was decided against. I feel like there'd be an opportunity here to partner with more traditional animal rights groups and "back to the land" groups, while also supporting EAs who would like to consume ethical animal products, and raising awareness in the general population of the insufficiency of the existing standards like "free range eggs". (I wonder if EA's status as a movement based around affluent young professionals in big cities affects the apparent lack of interest in this sort of approach? I live in a rural area with a bunch of independent farmers as neighbors; it's not uncommon for people to post stuff like "hey, my goat escaped, please let me know if you see it running around" or "FYI there's a bear in my backyard, you should probably bring your dogs inside if you live nearby" in the local Facebook group; I'd bet most EAs have never encountered with this sort of lifestyle. But then again maybe it's just not efficient; I assume that the vast majority of animal products come from factory farms.)

This could be a long slog but I think it could be valuable to identify the top ~100 OS libraries and identify their level of resourcing to avoid future attacks like the XZ attack. In general, I think work on hardening systems is an underrated aspect of defending against future highly capable autonomous AI agents.

Inside Wytham Abbey, the £15 Million Castle Effective Altruism Must Sell [Bloomberg] From the article: > Effective Ventures has since come to a settlement with the FTX estate and paid back the $26.8 million given to it by FTX Foundation. [...] It’s amid such turmoil that Wytham Abbey is being listed on the open market for £15 million [...] > > Adjusted for inflation, the purchase price of the house two years ago now equals £16.2 million. [...] The listing comes as homes on the UK’s once-hot country market are taking longer to sell, forcing some owners to offer discounts. I still think the intangible reputational damage is worse, but a loss of a million pounds (that could've been spent on malaria bed nets) would be nothing to sneeze at either. (archive link)

Is there a Slack group or something similar for Founders of early-stage (EA) startups? 

Common prevalence estimates are often wrong. Example: snakebites and my experience reading Long Covid literature. Both institutions like the WHO and academic literature appear to be incentivized to exaggerate. I think the Global Burden of Disease might be a more reliable source, but have not looked into it. I advise everyone using prevalence estimates to treat them with some skepticism and look up the source.

FAQ: “Ways the world is getting better” banner The banner will only be visible on desktop. If you can't see it, try expanding your window. It'll be up for a week.  How do I use the banner? 1. Click on an empty space to add an emoji,  2. Choose your emoji,  3. Write a one-sentence description of the good news you want to share,  4. Link an article or forum post that gives more information.  If you’d like to delete your entry, click the cross that appears when you hover over it. It will be deleted for everyone. What kind of stuff should I write? Anything that qualifies as good news relevant to the world's most important problems.  For example, Ben West’s recent quick takes (1, 2, 3). Avoid posting partisan political news, but the passage of relevant bills and policies is on topic.  Will my entry be anonymous? All submissions are displayed without your Forum name, so they are ~anonymous to users, however, usual moderation norms still apply (additionally, we may remove duplicates or borderline trollish submissions. This is an experiment, so we reserve the right to moderate heavily if necessary). Ask any other questions you have in the comments below. Feel free to dm me with feedback or comments.  

EAGxUtrecht (July 5-7) is now inviting applicants from the UK (alongside other Western European regions that don't currently have an upcoming EAGx).[1] Apply here! Ticket discounts are available and we have limited travel support. Utrecht is very easy to get to. You can fly/Eurostar to Amsterdam and then every 15 mins there's a direct train to Utrecht, which only takes 35 mins (and costs €10.20). 1. ^ Applicants from elsewhere are encouraged to apply but the bar for getting in is much higher.

What is the best practice for dealing with biased sources? For example, if I'm writing an article critical of EA and cite a claim made by emille torres, would it be misleading to not mention that they have an axe to grind?

나는 Brian Caplan의 기사 중 하나에서 비슷한 뉘앙스를 읽은 적이 있습니다. 공리주의자라면 신경증적인 사람들을 선호하는 사회를 만들 것입니다. 이 문제를 해결할 필요가 없다면 그 이유는 무엇입니까? 이 문제를 해결해야 한다면 어떻게 해결해야 할까요?

I don't think we need to explicitly alert the reader when we've received help from an LLM to write something (even if it wrote the bulk of the post). That's it, my quickest ever Quick Take.