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A quick annoucement that Magnify mentee applications are now open!
Magnify mentee applications are currently open!
We would love to hear from you if you are a woman, non-binary person, or trans person of any gender who is enthusiastic about pursuing a high-impact career using evidence-based approaches. Please apply here by the 18th March.
Past mentees have been most successful when they have a clear sense of what they would like to achieve through the 6-month mentorship program. We look to match pairings based on the needs and availability of the mentee and mentor, their goals, career paths, and what skills they are looking to develop.
On average, mentees and mentors meet once a month for 60-90 minutes with a series of optional prompt questions prepared by our team. In the post-round feedback form, the average for “I recommend being a Magnify mentee” was 9.28/10 in Round 3 and 9.4/10 in Round 4. You can see testimonies from some of our mentees here, here and here. Some reported outcomes for mentees were:
- Advice, guidance, and resources on achieving goals.
- Connection and support in pursuing opportunities (jobs, funding).
- Confidence-building.
- Specific guidance (How to network? How to write a good resume?).
- Joining a welcoming community for support through challenges.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with Kathryn at <kathryn@magnifymentoring.org>.
Hi all! A heads up that it is that time again - Magnify mentee applications are open :) More below. Thank you so much :)
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"Magnify Mentoring applications are now open for women, non-binary, and trans people of all genders who are looking to pursue high impact careers. You can apply here. Applications will close on the 10th July 2024.
Past mentees have been particularly successful when they have a sense of what they would like to achieve through mentorship. The matching process normally takes us between 4-6 weeks. We look to match pairings based on the needs and availability of the mentee and mentor, their goals, career paths, and what skills they are looking to develop.
On average, mentees and mentors meet once a month for 60-90 minutes with a series of optional prompt questions prepared by our team. In the post-round feedback form, the average for “I recommend being a Magnify mentee” was 9.28/10 in Round 3 and 9.4/10 in Round 4. You can see testimonies from some of our mentees here, here and here..
Some reported outcomes for mentees were:
- Advice, guidance, and resources on achieving goals.
- Connection and support in pursuing opportunities (jobs, funding).
- Confidence-building.
- Specific guidance (How to network? How to write a good resume?).
- Joining a welcoming community for support through challenges"
Pulling out a quick Magnify Mentoring update from the upcoming EA Newsletter.
- We have launched a database of job seekers. If you are a recruiter at an organization working on evidence-based interventions to make the world better, please reach out to us.
- We are planning to run a pilot project to evaluate the viability and usefulness of running additional mentorship rounds targeting individuals belonging to groups typically underrepresented in our focus areas. If the pilot is successful Magnify would continue to run two rounds per year for women, nonbinary, and trans people of all genders while adding in one or two separate rounds targeted at individuals belonging to these other groups. We plan to advertise the pilot round in December-January. We would love recommendations of potential mentors of all genders. Our one strict criteria is that mentors must be unusually kind people who are excited about supporting talented people and creating a warm and inclusive environment for everyone. Please drop us an email if you know anyone who fits this description including if you would like to become a mentor!
- Results from our fifth round of mentorship can be found here.
- We are delighted to announce we have been supported by Open Philanthropy. (Alongside our incredible individual donors.)
Curated and popular this week
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This is a crosspost for The Case for Insect Consciousness by Bob Fischer, which was originally published on Asterisk in January 2025.
[Subtitle.] The evidence that insects feel pain is mounting, however we approach the issue.
For years, I was on the fence about the possibility of insects feeling pain — sometimes, I defended the hypothesis;[1] more often, I argued against it.[2]
Then, in 2021, I started working on the puzzle of how to compare pain intensity across species. If a human and a pig are suffering as much as each one can, are they suffering the same amount? Or is the human’s pain worse? When my colleagues and I looked at several species, investigating both the probability of pain and its relative intensity,[3] we found something unexpected: on both scores, insects aren’t that different from many other animals.
Around the same time, I started working with an entomologist with a background in neuroscience. She helped me appreciate the weaknesses of the arguments against insect pain. (For instance, people make a big deal of stories about praying mantises mating while being eaten; they ignore how often male mantises fight fiercely to avoid being devoured.) The more I studied the science of sentience, the less confident I became about any theory that would let us rule insect sentience out.
I’m a philosopher, and philosophers pride themselves on following arguments wherever they lead. But we all have our limits, and I worry, quite sincerely, that I’ve been too willing to give insects the benefit of the doubt. I’ve been troubled by what we do to farmed animals for my entire adult life, whereas it’s hard to feel much for flies. Still, I find the argument for insect pain persuasive enough to devote a lot of my time to insect welfare research. In brief, the apparent evidence for the capacity of insects to feel pain is uncomfortably strong.[4] We could dismiss it if we had a consensus-commanding theory of sentience that explained why the apparent evidence is ir
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Introduction
I have been writing posts critical of mainstream EA narratives about AI capabilities and timelines for many years now. Compared to the situation when I wrote my posts in 2018 or 2020, LLMs now dominate the discussion, and timelines have also shrunk enormously. The ‘mainstream view’ within EA now appears to be that human-level AI will be arriving by 2030, even as early as 2027. This view has been articulated by 80,000 Hours, on the forum (though see this excellent piece excellent piece arguing against short timelines), and in the highly engaging science fiction scenario of AI 2027. While my article piece is directed generally against all such short-horizon views, I will focus on responding to relevant portions of the article ‘Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion’ by Will MacAskill and Fin Moorhouse.
Rates of Growth
The authors summarise their argument as follows:
> Currently, total global research effort grows slowly, increasing at less than 5% per year. But total AI cognitive labour is growing more than 500x faster than total human cognitive labour, and this seems likely to remain true up to and beyond the point where the cognitive capabilities of AI surpasses all humans. So, once total AI cognitive labour starts to rival total human cognitive labour, the growth rate of overall cognitive labour will increase massively. That will drive faster technological progress.
MacAskill and Moorhouse argue that increases in training compute, inference compute and algorithmic efficiency have been increasing at a rate of 25 times per year, compared to the number of human researchers which increases 0.04 times per year, hence the 500x faster rate of growth. This is an inapt comparison, because in the calculation the capabilities of ‘AI researchers’ are based on their access to compute and other performance improvements, while no such adjustment is made for human researchers, who also have access to more compute and other productivity enhancements each year.
Hi all! A heads up that it is that time again - Magnify mentee applications are open :) More below. Thank you so much :)
___
"Magnify Mentoring applications are now open for women, non-binary, and trans people of all genders who are looking to pursue high impact careers. You can apply here. Applications will close on the 10th July 2024.
Past mentees have been particularly successful when they have a sense of what they would like to achieve through mentorship. The matching process normally takes us between 4-6 weeks. We look to match pairings based on the needs and availability of the mentee and mentor, their goals, career paths, and what skills they are looking to develop.
On average, mentees and mentors meet once a month for 60-90 minutes with a series of optional prompt questions prepared by our team. In the post-round feedback form, the average for “I recommend being a Magnify mentee” was 9.28/10 in Round 3 and 9.4/10 in Round 4. You can see testimonies from some of our mentees here, here and here..
Some reported outcomes for mentees were: