I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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Epistemic status: Wrote this pretty fast, probably ~70% confident some version of the thesis claim is true, would welcome being proven demonstrably wrong.
Context: I’m a grantmaker focused on alt-protein and am fairly well-connected/moderately in the loop of what animal welfare grantmakers are doing.
This post was significantly inspired by “...
For me, perhaps the biggest takeaway from Aschenbrenner's manifesto is that even if we solve alignment, we still have an incredibly thorny coordination problem between the US and China, in which each is massively incentivized to race ahead and develop military power using superintelligence, putting them both and the rest of the world at immense risk. And I wonder if, after seeing this in advance, we can sit down and solve this coordination problem in ways that lead to a better outcome with a higher chance than the "race ahead" strategy and don't risk encountering a short period of incredibly volatile geopolitical instability in which both nations develop and possibly use never-seen-before weapons of mass destruction.
Edit: although I can see how attempts at intervening in any way and raising the salience of the issue risk making the situation worse.