It feels like it’s been a while since we had an appreciation thread. At a tough time for the community I thought that might be especially nice for all of us. I get a lot out of gratitude journaling, but I also really enjoy hearing what other people are appreciative of, big and small. I’ll try to get us started with a few things of different scopes and subject matters, to hopefully make it as easy as possible for others to chip in with whatever they feel appreciative of today!
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I’m appreciative for Shakeel Hashim. Comms roles seem hard in general. Comms roles for EA seem even harder than that. Comms roles for EA during the last 3 months sound unbelievably hard and stressful.
(Note: Shakeel is a personal friend of mine, but I don’t think that has much influence on how appreciative I am of the work he’s doing, and everyone else managing these crises).
I appreciate the fact that when I teach undergraduate courses on Effective Altruism, the students tend to find the movement's insights, practices, and ethics both fascinating and inspiring.
Despite all the media controversy around EA the last few months, most ordinary students simply haven't heard any of this media negativity. Indeed, most haven't heard of EA at all. But they resonate to the ideas, and that's what matters.
I regularly work in two different office spaces, and both of them are just really nice to work in. It makes a big difference to my productivity and happiness to be able to work in an office alongside people working on similar projects, and for that to be somewhere that’s carefully optimised so that I have the equipment I need, good internet, quiet meeting rooms etc. I’m grateful to all the people making that possible, including Jonathan Michel, Josie Inaldo, Tom Hempstock, Balázs Rapi and Marco Pace.
I appreciate the speed of forming friendships with strangers. I feel like our movement is outstanding and gorgeous in the sense that if I woke up one day teleported to a strange town where I didn't know anyone, the speed at which I could make friends by going to an EA meetup is really special.
When I do travel, EA meetups are like old friends I've never met before.
I think this is an important property that I hope to protect through movement growing pains.
I think the people I'm around in this community are really surprisingly good at helping me live up to my values. Sometimes that's by role modelling it - I think I wouldn't have donated nearly as much as 10% over my life if I hadn't come across Giving What We Can. Some of it is by being willing to challenge me and point out hard things, and trusting me to take negative feedback in the kind spirit it's meant. A lot of it is just by suggesting specific new things to try that might make it easier to achieve my goals - even just small things like things to help me sleep and wake up so I'm less likely to be underslept.
I'm really happy that the Shrimp Welfare Project exists. Listening to their 80K podcast gave me the most "classic EA" warm fuzzy feelings I've had in a while. I think it speaks really highly of CE that they incubated a project like that, and of other EA funders that they've helped support it.
Also this comment was just pure <3 for me:
I agree - it was a real priority for us to not have a curled shrimp in our logo (which was tricky!) for this reason. And you're right, most shrimps that are farmed are whiteish or brownish (though there are over 2,000 species of shrimps, and some are very colourful!).
I am joining you with appreciation for Shrimp Welfare Project. I work for CE so I am biased but I am also an animal activist for 22 years now, and I think it's incredible how quickly this charity moved from concept to potential impact. Just signing an agreement that will make them reach 125 million animals per year is incredible: https://www.shrimpwelfareproject.org/post/mou-with-mer-seafood
They have further collaborations in progress. It will be probably the first organization ever to impact billions of animals in a short time span (the org was just launched in September 2021 :)
I'm grateful to Anima International and Andrew Skowron for their free to use investigation archive. The photographs are extremely powerful, and these resources empower so many activists around the world. Most animal activists I know in Turkey are using photos obtained by Animal International even when they are not aware of Anima International at all. It's more difficult to document the impact of this kind work, but when some activists somewhere in the world succeed by using these images, Anima International is responsible for some part of that success because of their footage.
I am upvoting because I am observing Andrew Skowron's and fellow activist investigators' work for years now, and they are extremely dedicated, super hard-working, and created a lot of press coverage for animals through their work! This is not yet well-measured work, but I think at some point EA will come up with better systems of measuring impact for animals, and this kind of work might play a big role in e.g. policy changes (fur-free campaigns that are heavily based on video footage).
I’m excited that we’re getting close to EAG Bay Area. EAGs are a huge undertaking, and they’re just incredibly well organised and thought through compared to any academic conference I’ve been to. The level of detailed planning to ensure that people can get as much out of it as possible is really impressive.
I am super grateful to @OllieBase for EAGxes. I participated in 3 events last year: Prague, Berlin, and Rotterdam, and they were all really great! All of them were very welcoming, the people I met were great, and the events were run smoothly. As a person working specifically in outreach, I highly appreciate how helpful Ollie has been to our team, and how his kind attitude translates to other organizers. Grateful also to them, for all their hard work and making participation effortless for us. Big hugs!!!
I’m grateful to the people fielding the Charities Commission enquiries. It’s great that the CC looks carefully into important potentially troubling cases for charities, but it creates quite a bit of work for the organisation. It’s really great that there are competent, caring, dedicated people tackling this so that I can continue my day job.
I love that people on the Forum tend to celebrate null results and postmortems of projects that have been discontinued (notable recent example).
A few friends of mine organised a karaoke night the other day. Organising something like that and needing to get everyone started singing seems pretty intimidating to me. I’m really glad for other people doing it! Singing and dancing together without needing to stay up late or go to a club is just great.
I was talking with someone about survey design recently, and remembering how useful it was to have a workshop with a Faunalytics staff member on survey design. I think that particular person no longer does office hours, but they still do free office hours on several other topics and have a library of research and survey design advice.
Less importantly, I love the Faunalytics logo.
I am grateful that this community exists - where one can take seriously trying to contribute in bringing about a better world while staying grounded. Appreciating the truth-seeking folks around me who I can call friends and trust will be honest about their critiques - always with the intent to encourage improvement instead of pulling me down (you know who you are!).
I really appreciate Rethink Priorities, both because I was a fellow there and think it really helped me personally and because they're working on really cool and I think useful work, and post about it on the Forum a lot. :)
I really appreciate people who notice that something should be done — whether that's putting together a resource, coordinating people to get a project rolling, etc. — and just decide to do it.
I appreciate the shortform feature on the EA forum and LessWrong. I feel a bit insecure about my writing style and it feels a bit intimidating to post on the internet. Writing shortform posts has been helpful for getting more comfortable sharing my thoughts on the forum.
I also feel very appreciative towards various parts of the EA/EA-adjacent community I have interacted a lot with socially. They have been instrumental in helping me form close friendships with people I vibe a lot with and my social life would feel less complete if I hadn't encountered EA. Some of the people I've met have been very inspirational and have motivated me to be more principled, thoughtful, and ambitious.
Perhaps a bit controversial, but I am grateful for all the journalists, critical voices and others spending their valuable time vetting the EA movement. While not all their findings are communicated in the most productive manner, I am happy that the community I am associating with is being thoroughly investigated so that I can feel more comfortable associating with EA. This is not what I am most grateful for, but I feel that their work is somewhat underappreciated, perhaps because it is quite painful for many of us.
Another appreciation goes to @James Ozden for basically everything he posts in the EA forum. I highly appreciate his work for animals and his participation in numerous discussions here.
I appreciate Josh Clymer for living up to his reflectively endorsed values so strongly. Josh is extremely willing to do the thing that he thinks is most impactful, even when such a thing looks like going to school wearing a clown suit.
Curated and popular this week
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At the last EAG Bay Area, I gave a workshop on navigating a difficult job market, which I repeated days ago at EAG London. A few people have asked for my notes and slides, so I’ve decided to share them here.
This is the slide deck I used.
Below is a low-effort loose transcript, minus the interactive bits (you can see these on the slides in the form of reflection and discussion prompts with a timer). In my opinion, some interactive elements were rushed because I stubbornly wanted to pack too much into the session. If you’re going to re-use them, I recommend you allow for more time than I did if you can (and if you can’t, I empathise with the struggle of making difficult trade-offs due to time constraints).
One of the benefits of written communication over spoken communication is that you can be very precise and comprehensive. I’m sorry that those benefits are wasted on this post. Ideally, I’d have turned my speaker notes from the session into a more nuanced written post that would include a hundred extra points that I wanted to make and caveats that I wanted to add. Unfortunately, I’m a busy person, and I’ve come to accept that such a post will never exist. So I’m sharing this instead as a MVP that I believe can still be valuable –certainly more valuable than nothing!
Introduction
80,000 Hours’ whole thing is asking: Have you considered using your career to have an impact?
As an advisor, I now speak with lots of people who have indeed considered it and very much want it – they don't need persuading. What they need is help navigating a tough job market.
I want to use this session to spread some messages I keep repeating in these calls and create common knowledge about the job landscape.
But first, a couple of caveats:
1. Oh my, I wonder if volunteering to run this session was a terrible idea. Giving advice to one person is difficult; giving advice to many people simultaneously is impossible. You all have different skill sets, are at different points in
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Thank you to Arepo and Eli Lifland for looking over this article for errors.
I am sorry that this article is so long. Every time I thought I was done with it I ran into more issues with the model, and I wanted to be as thorough as I could. I’m not going to blame anyone for skimming parts of this article.
Note that the majority of this article was written before Eli’s updated model was released (the site was updated june 8th). His new model improves on some of my objections, but the majority still stand.
Introduction:
AI 2027 is an article written by the “AI futures team”. The primary piece is a short story penned by Scott Alexander, depicting a month by month scenario of a near-future where AI becomes superintelligent in 2027,proceeding to automate the entire economy in only a year or two and then either kills us all or does not kill us all, depending on government policies.
What makes AI 2027 different from other similar short stories is that it is presented as a forecast based on rigorous modelling and data analysis from forecasting experts. It is accompanied by five appendices of “detailed research supporting these predictions” and a codebase for simulations. They state that “hundreds” of people reviewed the text, including AI expert Yoshua Bengio, although some of these reviewers only saw bits of it.
The scenario in the short story is not the median forecast for any AI futures author, and none of the AI2027 authors actually believe that 2027 is the median year for a singularity to happen. But the argument they make is that 2027 is a plausible year, and they back it up with images of sophisticated looking modelling like the following:
This combination of compelling short story and seemingly-rigorous research may have been the secret sauce that let the article to go viral and be treated as a serious project:To quote the authors themselves:
It’s been a crazy few weeks here at the AI Futures Project. Almost a million people visited our webpage; 166,00
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Authors: Joel McGuire (analysis, drafts) and Lily Ottinger (editing)
Formosa: Fulcrum of the Future?
An invasion of Taiwan is uncomfortably likely and potentially catastrophic. We should research better ways to avoid it.
TLDR: I forecast that an invasion of Taiwan increases all the anthropogenic risks by ~1.5% (percentage points) of a catastrophe killing 10% or more of the population by 2100 (nuclear risk by 0.9%, AI + Biorisk by 0.6%). This would imply it constitutes a sizable share of the total catastrophic risk burden expected over the rest of this century by skilled and knowledgeable forecasters (8% of the total risk of 20% according to domain experts and 17% of the total risk of 9% according to superforecasters).
I think this means that we should research ways to cost-effectively decrease the likelihood that China invades Taiwan. This could mean exploring the prospect of advocating that Taiwan increase its deterrence by investing in cheap but lethal weapons platforms like mines, first-person view drones, or signaling that mobilized reserves would resist an invasion.
Disclaimer
I read about and forecast on topics related to conflict as a hobby (4th out of 3,909 on the Metaculus Ukraine conflict forecasting competition, 73 out of 42,326 in general on Metaculus), but I claim no expertise on the topic. I probably spent something like ~40 hours on this over the course of a few months.
Some of the numbers I use may be slightly outdated, but this is one of those things that if I kept fiddling with it I'd never publish it.
Acknowledgements: I heartily thank Lily Ottinger, Jeremy Garrison, Maggie Moss and my sister for providing valuable feedback on previous drafts.
Part 0: Background
The Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) ended with the victorious communists establishing the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland. The defeated Kuomintang (KMT[1]) retreated to Taiwan in 1949 and formed the Republic of China (ROC). A dictatorship during the cold war, T
I am grateful that this community exists - where one can take seriously trying to contribute in bringing about a better world while staying grounded. Appreciating the truth-seeking folks around me who I can call friends and trust will be honest about their critiques - always with the intent to encourage improvement instead of pulling me down (you know who you are!).