Agustín Covarrubias's Quick takes

My understanding is that they already raise and donate millions of dollars per year to effective projects in global health (especially tuberculosis)
For what it's worth, their subreddit seems a bit ambivalent about explicit "effective altruism" connections (see here or here)

Btw, I would be surprised if the ITN framework was independently developed from first principles:

He says exactly the same 3 things in the same order
They have known about effective altruism for at least 11 years (see the top comment here)
There have been many effective altruism themed videos in their "Project for Awesome" campaign several years
They have collaborated several times with 80,000 hours and Giving What We Can
There are many other reasonable things you can come up with (e.g. urgency)

Agustín Covarrubias 🔸

AI safety

Policy

SB 1047 is a critical piece of legislation for AI safety, but there haven’t been great ways of getting up to speed, especially since the bill has been amended several times. Since the bill's now finalized, better resources exist to catch up. Here's a few:

A four-page summary of the bill [written by bill proponents]
A recent post from Zvi Mowshowitz explaining the latest version of the bill
A summary of the latest round of amendments [written by bill proponents]
Latest bill text

If you are working in AI safety or AI policy, I think understanding this bill is pretty important. Hopefully this helps.

Agustín Covarrubias 🔸

Community

Building EA

Some random appreciations (because someone nudged me to give positive feedback that I would have otherwise not shared with anyone):

I think the Online team at CEA has done an outstanding job improving the forum. Every month or so, they keep surprising me with more features I didn't know I needed, which reflects them doing a lot of hard work behind the scenes to create as much value for the EA community as possible. I've also been able to observe firsthand them gathering user feedback and doing feature prioritization, and as a software engineer, I'm extremely impressed!
Even though the Community Health at CEA has made many errors in the past, I think we often miss both how difficult their work is, and how every decision they make is ridden with crucial tradeoffs, many of which are invisible to others^[1]. Because every successful incident they handle correctly (or even prevent) is one incident we probably don't hear about, I want to take a moment to highlight that in every interaction I've had with them, they've acted with incredible professionalism, demonstrated deep concern for everyone involved, and acted very competently.

^{^}
Having been in similar positions many times as a community builder (both inside and outside EA), I know just how difficult the job is, and how, for example, often what others see as clear failures are just the result of them lacking information which can't be publicly shared without harming others.

Agustín Covarrubias 🔸

Cause prioritization

Quick poll [✅ / ❌]: Do you feel like you don't have a good grasp of Shapley values, despite wanting to?

(Context for after voting: I'm trying to figure out if more explainers of this would be helpful. I still feel confused about some of its implications, despite having spent significant time trying to understand it)

Stan Pinsent

I have a post that takes readers through a basic example of how to calculate Shapley values.

Agustín Covarrubias 🔸

I read your post while I was writing up the wiki article on Shapley values and thought it was really useful. Thanks for making that post!

Nathan Young

You might want to use viewpoints.xyz to run a poll here.

Comments

^{^}

Having been in similar positions many times as a community builder (both inside and outside EA), I know just how difficult the job is, and how, for example, often what others see as clear failures are just the result of them lacking information which can't be publicly shared without harming others.