Maybe I didn't understand it properly, but I guess there's something wrong when the total welfare score of chimps is 47 and, for humans in low middle-income countries it's 32.
Depending on your population ethics, one may think "we should improve the prospects in poor countries", but others can say "we should have more chimps." 
Or this scale has serious problems for comparisons between different species.

Is Climate-sensitivity super-wrong?

Thomas Homer-Dixon on why James Hansen's latest climate findings matter

"The bottom line is startling: Hansen’s team argues that mainstream climate science, as reflected in the IPCC’s reports, underestimates climate sensitivity to CO2 by about 50 percent. Their research suggests that the “short-term”—century time scale—equilibrium warming from a doubling of CO2e should be 4.5 degrees C, not the standard estimate of 3 degrees.

The reason for this error, in the view of Hansen and his team, is that conventional climate science, which is almost wholly wedded to climate models, has miscalculated the past impact of aerosols on warming trends. Now that shipping aerosols have declined dramatically across the north Pacific and Atlantic, that extra climate forcing is being revealed—ergo the acceleration. Paleoclimatic data, they argue, also support a substantially higher estimate of climate sensitivity."
https://chalkboard.cascadeinstitute.org/a-climate-science-wake-up-call-james-hansens-latest-research/

Just sharing some concerns about live exports (yeah, the transportation of living animals in ships)

I wonder if we could do more about live exports. I would like to know if it's worse than some other practices in factory farming that we often highlight (like caging hens), but it seems more susceptible of getting support from meat-eaters who consider it cruel and unnecessary. I know the subject has been mentioned en passant in some Forum posts and it's a subject that may figure in European reforms... 

I'm particularly concerned with Brazil, since it's such a large exporter - but the same applies to Australia, too. At least two organizations (Fórum Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Animal - FNDPA , and Mercy for Animals) working with legal measures to ban the practice in Brazil have received support from EA - btw, one can sign a petition on MfA's website. But my (perfunctory) knowledge of Brazilian politics and law makes skeptic that this could work without external pressure.

Daron Acemoglu interesting review of Ord's The Precipice: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/how-to-think-about-existential-and-immediate-risks-by-daron-acemoglu-2021-05

Anyone else consders  the case of Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland (application no. 53600/20) of the European Court of Human Rights a possibly useful for GCR litigation?

Idea for free (feel free to use, abuse, steal): a tool to automatize donations + birthday messages. Imagine a tool that captures your contacts and their corresponding birthdays from Facebook; then, you will make (or schedule) one (or more) donations to a number of charities, and the tool will customize birthday messages with a card mentioning that you donated $ in their honor and send it on their corresponding birthdays.

For instance: imagine you use this tool today; it’ll then map all the birthdays of your acquaintances for the next year. Then you’ll select donating, e.g., $1000 to AMF, and 20 friends or relatives you like; the tool will write 20 draft messages (you can select different templates the tool will suggest you… there’s probably someone already doing this with ChatGPT), one for each of them, including a card certifying that you donated $50 to AMF in honor of their birthday, and send the message on the corresponding date (the tool could let you revise it one day before it). There should be some options to customize messages and charities (I think it might be important that you choose a charity that the other person would identify with a little bit - maybe Every.org would be more interested in it than GWWC). So you’ll save a lot of time writing nice birthday messages for those you like. And, if you only select effective charities, you could deduce that amount from your pledge.

Is there anything like that already?

So it's on!

The Effective Thesis Exceptional Research Award (that's how the website calls it), or High-Potential Award (that's how it shows up on Google), or maybe just Award (how apparently everyone calls it) is open to submissions up to Sep 2022.
(I'm pretty sure there's a top post coming, but I thought it'd be cool to mention it in shortform right away. Feels like a scoop)

This award has been established to encourage and recognize promising research by students that has the potential to significantly improve the world.
[...]

Submissions can consist of theses, dissertations, or capstone papers at the undergraduate or graduate level. Other substantive work forming part of a graduation semester may also be considered. To be eligible, submissions must have been produced in the academic year 2021 - 2022 and relate to one or multiple research directions prioritised by Effective Thesis. See the list of research directions below or see here for more information.

https://www.mopp-journal.org/go-to-main-page/calls-for-papers/ A call for papers on longermism on the Moral philosophy and politics journal

An objection to the non-identity problem: shouldn't disregarding the welfare of non-existent people preclude most interventions on child mortality and education?

One objection against favoring the long-term future is that we don't have duties towards people who still don't exist. However, I believe that, when someone presents a claim  like that, probably what they want to state is that we should discount future benefits (for some reason), or that we don't have a duty towards people who will only exist in the far future. But it turns out that such a claim apparently proves too much; it proves that, for instance, we have no obligation to invest on reducing the mortality of infants less than one year old in the next two years

The most effective interventions in saving lives often do so by saving young children. Now, imagine you deploy an intervention similar to those of Against Malaria Foundation - i.e., distributing bednets to reduce contagion. At the beggining, you spend months studying, then preparing, then you go to the field and distribute bednets, and then one or two years later you evaluate how many malaria cases were prevented in comparison to a baseline. It turns out that most cases of  averted deaths (and disabilities and years of life gained) correspond to kids who had not yet been conceived when you started studying.

Similarly, if someone starts advocating an effective basic education reform today, they will only succeed in enacting it in some years - thus we can expect that  most of the positive effects will happen many years later.

(Actually, for anyone born in the last few years, we can expect that most of their positive impact will affect people who are not born yet. If there's any value in positivel influencing these children, most of it will happen to people who are not yet born)

This means that, at the beggining of this project, most of the impact corresponded to people who didn't exist yet - so you were under no moral obligation to help them.

Is there anything like EA Consulting for charities?

I mean, we do have:

(a) meta-charities (e.g., GW, SoGive...) which evaluate projects and organizations;

(b) charity incubators (Charity Entrepreneurship...), which select and incubate ideas for new EA projects;

(c) recommended charities that provide consulting services for policy-makers, such as Innovation in Government Initiative;

(d) some EAs working in consulting firms (EACN) - which, among other things, aim to nudge corporations and co-workers into more effective behavior.
But I didn't find any org providing to non-EA charities consulting services aiming to make them more effective. Would it be low-impact? Or is it a low-hanging fruit?

One might think that this is basically the same job GW already does... Well, yeah, I suppose you would actually use a similar approach to evaluate impact, but it's very different to provide  to a charity  recommendations that aim to help them achieve their own goals. This would be framed as assistance, not as some sort of examination; while GW's stakeholders are donors, this "consulting charity" would work for the charities themselves. Besides, in order to prevent conflicts of interest, corporations often use different firms to provide them auditting (which would be akin to charity evaluation - i.e., a service that ultimately is concerned with investores) and consulting services (which is provided to the corporation and its managers).
This could be particularly useful for charities in regions that lack a (effective) charity culture.

Update: an example of this idea is the Philanthropy Advisory Fellowship sponsored by EA Harvard - which has, e.g., made recommendations to Arymax Foundation on the best cause areas to invest in Brazil. But I believe an "EA Consulting" org would provide other services, and not only to funders.

I was thinking about Chad current situation and Vox's piece on Parliamentarism... Has anyone assessed (ITN or EA-style evaluation) political stability as a cause area?

I mean, it's pretty relevant for peace (I guess most wars result from conflict of factions or succession crises) and for a well functioning government. People talk about the dangers of polarization, about why nations fail, or autoritarianism, or iidm... It's not neglected per se (it's been the focus of some of classical works in political phil & sci), but I'm not sure all low-hanging has been eaten; plus, thinking about interventions as increasing / decreasing political stability might help assessing other areas (like IIDM).

I was thinking about Urukagina, the first monarch ever mentioned for his benevolence instead of military prowess. Are there any common traces among them? Should we write something like that Forum post on dark trait rulers - but with opposite sign? I googled a bit about benevolent kings (I thought it'd provide more insight than looking to XXth century biographies), but, except maybe for enlightened despots, most of the guys (like Suleiman, the magnificent) in these lists are conquerors who just weren't brutal and were kind law-givers to their people - which you could also say about Napoleon. I was thinking more about guys like Ashoka and Marcus Aurelius, who seem to have despised the hunger for conquests in other people and were actually willing to improve human welfare for moral reasons

Shouldn't we have more EA editors in Philpapers categories?

Philpapers is this huge index/community of academic philosophers and texts. It's a good place to start researching a topic. Part of the work is done by voluntary editors and assistants, who assume the responsibility of categorizing and including relevant bibliography; in exchange, they are constantly in touch with the corresponding subject. Some EAs are responsible for their corresponding fields; however, I noticed that some relevant EA-related categories currently have no editor (e.g.: Impact of Artificial Intelligence). I wonder: wouldn't it be useful if EAs assumed these positions?

Why don't we have more advices / mentions about donating through a last will - like Effective Legacy? Is it too obvious? Or absurd?

All other cases of someone discussing charity & wills were about the dilemma "give now vs. (invest) post mortem". But we can expect that even GWWC pledgers save something for retirement or emergency; so why not to legate a part of it to the most effective charities, too? Besides, this may attract non-pledgers equally: even if you're not willing to sacrifice a portion of your consumption for the sake of the greater good, why not those savings for retirement, in case you die before spending it all?

Of course, I'm not saying this would be super-effective; but it might be a low-hanging fruit. Has anyone explored this "path"?

Nuka zaria: research if Chatgpt is quoting from a parallel universe
 

(Well, it's already the cruelest month in UK, right?)

Why don't we have an "Effective App"?

See, e.g., Ribon - an app that gives you points (“ribons”) for reading positive news (e.g. “handicapped walks again thanks to exoskeleton”) sponsored by corporations; then you choose one of the TLYCS charities, and your points are converted into a donation.

Ribon is a Brazilian for-profit; they claim to donate 70% of what they receive from sponsors, but I haven’t found precise stats. It has skyrocketed this year: from their informed impact, I estimate they have donated about U$ 33k to TLYCS – which is a lot for Brazilian standards. They intend to expand (they gathered more than R$ 1 mi – roughly U$250k - from investors this year) and will soon launch an ICO. Perhaps an EA non-profit could do even more good?

Opportunity for Austrians
Article by Seána Glennon: “In the coming week, thousands of households across Austria will receive an invitation to participate in a citizens’ assembly with a unique goal: to determine how to spend the €25 million fortune of a 31-year-old heiress, Marlene Engelhorn, who believes that the system that allowed her to inherit such a vast sum of money (tax free) is deeply flawed."

I was Reading about Meghan Sullivan “principle of non-arbitrariness,” and it reminded me Parfit’s argument against subjectivist reasoning in On What Matters… but why are philosophers (well, and people in general) against arbitrariness? I mean, I do agree it’s a tempting intuition, but I’ve never seen (a) a formal enunciation of what counts as arbitrary (is "arbitrary" arbitrary?), and (b) an a priori argument against. Of course, if someone’s preference ordering varies totally randomly, we can’t represent them with a utility function, and perhaps we could accuse them of being inconsistent. But that’s not what philosophers' examples usually chastise: if one has a predictable preference for eating shrimps only on Friday, or disregards pain only on Thursday, there’s no instability here – you can represent it with a utility function (having time as a dimension).

There isn’t even any a priori feature allowing us to say that is evolutionarily unstable, since this could only be assessed when we look at whom our agent will interact with. Which makes me think that arbitrariness is not a priori at all, of course – it depends on social practices such as “giving reasons” for actions and decisions (i don't think Parfit would deny that; idk about Sullivan). There might be a thriving community of people who only love shrimp on Friday, for no reason at all; but, if you don’t share this abnormal preference, it might be hard to model their behavior, to cooperate with them - at least, in this example, when it comes gastronomic enterprises. On the other hand, if you can just have a story (even if kinda unbelievable: “it’s a psychosomatic allergy”) to explain this preference, it’s ok: you’re just another peculiar human. I can understand you now; your explanation works as a salience that allows me to better predict your behavior.

I suspect many philosophical (a priori-like) intuitions depend on things like Schelling points (i.e., the problem of finding salient solutions for social practices people can converge to) than most philosophers would admit. Of course, late Wittgenstein scholars are OK with that, since for them everything is about forms of life, language games, etc. But I think relativistic / conventionalist philosophers unduly trivialize this feature, and so neglect an important point: whatever counts as arbitrary is not, well, arbitrary – and we can often demonstrate that what we call “arbitrary” is suboptimal, inconsistent with other preferences or intuitions, or hard to communicate (and so a poor candidate for a social norm / convention / intuition). 

How consistent are "global risk reports"?

We know that the track record of pundits is terrible, but many international consultancy firms have been publishing annual "global risks reports" like the WEF's, where they list the main global risks (e.g. top 10) for a certain period (e.g., 2y). Well, I was wondering if someone has measured their consistency; I mean, I suppose that if you publish in 2018 a list of the top 10 risks for 2019 & 2020, you should expect many of the same risks to show up in your 2019 report (i.e., if you are a reliable predictor, risks in report y should appear in report y+1). Hasn't anyone checked this yet?
If not, I'll file this under "a pet project I'll probably not have time to take in the foreseeable future"

What I miss when I read about the morality of discounting is a disanalogy that explains why hyperbolic or exponential discount rates might be reasonable for individuals with limited lifespans and such and such opportunity costs, but not for intertemporal collective decision-making. Then we could understand why pure discount is tempting, and maybe even realize there's something that temporal impartiality doesn't capture. If there's any literature about it, I'd like to know. Please, not the basic heuristics & bias stuff - I did my homework. For instance, if human welfare was something that could grow like compound interests, it'd make sense to talk about pure exponential discount. If you could guarantee that all of the dead in the battle of Marathon would have, in expectancy, added good to the overall happiness (or whatever you use as a goal function) in the world and transmitted it to their descendants, then you could say that those deaths are a greater evil than the millions of casualties in WW2; you could think of that welfare as "investment" instead of "consumption". But that's implausible. On the other hand, there's a small grain of truth here: a tragedy happening in the past will reverberate longer in the world historical trajectory. That's just causality + temporal asymmetry. This makes me think about cluelessness... I do have a tendency to think good facts have a tendency to lead to better consequences, in general; you don't have to be an opmitist about it: bad facts just tend to lead to worse consequences, too. The opposite thesis, that a good/bad fact is as likely to cause good as evil, seems quite implausible. So you might be able to think about goodness as investment a little bit; instead of pure discount, maybe we should have something like a proxy for "relative impact in world trajectories"?

I was recently reading about the International Panel for Social Progress: https://www.ipsp.org/ I had never heard of it before. Which surprised me, since it's kind of like the IPCC, but for social progress. I got the impression that it somehow failed - in reaching significant consensus, in influencing policy... but why?

Can Longtermists "profit" from short-term bias?

We often think about human short-term bias (and the associated hyperbolic discount) and the uncertainty of the future as (among the) long-termism’s main drawbacks; i.e., people won’t think about policies concerning the future because they can’t appreciate or compute their value. However, those features may actually provide some advantages, too – by evoking something analogous to the effect of the veil of ignorance:

1. They allow long-termism to provide some sort of focal point where people with different allegiances may converge; i.e., being left- or right-wing inclined (probably) does not affect the importance someone assigns to existential risk – though it may influence the trade-off with other values (think about how risk mitigation may impact liberty and equality).
2. And (maybe there’s a correlation with the previous point) it may allow for disinterested reasoning – i.e., if someone is hyperbolically less self-interested in what will happen in 50 or 100 years, then they would not strongly oppose policies to be implemented in 50 or 100 years – as long as they don’t bear significant costs today.

I think (1) is quite likely acknowledged among EA thinkers, though I don’t recall it being explicitly stated; some may even reply “isn’t it obvious?”, but I don’t believe outsiders would immediately recognize it.

On the other hand, I’m confident (2) is either completely wrong, or not recognized by most people.If it's true, we could use it to extract from people, in the present, conditional commitments to be enforced in the (relatively) long-term future; e.g., if present investors discount future returns hyperbolically, they wouldn’t oppose something like a Windfall Clause. Maybe Roy's nuke insurance could benefit from this bias, too.

I wonder if this could be used for institutional design; for instance, creating or reforming organizations is often burdensome, because different interest groups compete to keep or expand their present influence and privileges – e.g., legislators will favor electoral reforms allowing them to be re-elected. Thus, if we could design arrangements to be enforced decades (how long?) after their adoption, without interfering with current status quo, we would eliminate a good deal of its opposition; the problem then subsumes to deciding what kind of arrangements would be useful to design this way, taking into account uncertainty, cluelessness, value shift…

Are there any examples of existing or proposed institutions that try to profit from this short-term vs. long-term bias in a similar way? Is there any research in this line I’m failing to follow? Is it worth a longer post?

(One possibility is that we can’t really do that - this bias is something to be fought, not something we can collectively profit from; so, assuming the hinge of history hypothesis is false, the best we can do is to “transfer resources” from the present to the future, as sovereign funds and patient philanthropy advocates already do)

T20 Brasil | T20 BRASIL CALL FOR POLICY BRIEF ABSTRACTS: LET’S RETHINK THE WORLD
 

The T20 Brasil process will put forward policy recommendations to G20 officials involved in the Sherpa and Finance tracks in the form of a final communiqué and task forces recommendations.

To inform these documents, we are calling upon think tanks and research centres around the world – this invitation extends beyond G20 members – to build and/or reach out to their networks, share evidence, exchange ideas, and develop joint proposals for policy briefs. The latter should put forward clear policy proposals to support G20 in addressing global challenges.

Selection criteria

Policy briefs must be related to the 36 subtopics that have been selected based on (i) the suggestions received from more than 100 national and foreign think tanks and research centres that have already expressed their interest in engaging with the T20 Brasil process and activities and (ii) the three priorities spelt out by the G20 Brazil presidency. These subtopics are organised under the six Task Forces themes.

Is 'donations as gifts' neglected?

I enjoy sending 'donations as gifts' - i.e., donating to GD, GW or AMF in honor of someone else (e.g., as a birthday gift). It doesn't actually affect my overall budget for donations; but this way, I try to subtly nudge this person to consider doing the same with their friends, or maybe even becoming a regular donor.

I wonder if other EAs do that. Perhaps it seems very obvious (for some cultures where donations are common), but I haven't seen any remark or analysis about it (well, maybe I'm just wasting my time: only one friend of mine stated he enjoyed his gift, but I don't think he has ever done it himself), and many organizations don't provide an accessible tool to do this.

P.S.: BTW, my birthday is on May 14th, so if anyone wants to send me one of these "gifts", I'd rather have you donating to GCRI.

Philosophers and economists seem to disagree about the marginalist/arbitrage argument that a social discount rate should equal (or at least be majorly influenced by) the marginal social opportunity cost of capital. I wonder if there's any discussion of this topic in the context of negative interest rates. For example, would defenders of that argument accept that, as those opportunity costs decline, so should the SDR?

I was thinking about the EA criticism contest... did anyone submit something like "FTX"? Then give that person a prize! Forecaster of the year! And second place for the best entries talking about accountability and governance. If not... then maybe it's interesting to highlight: all of those "critiques" didn't foresee the main risks that materialized in the community this year. Maybe if we had framed it as a forecasting contest instead... and yet, we have many remarkable forecasters around, and apparently none of them suggested it was dangerous to place so much faith on one person. Or it's just a matter of attention. So I ask: what is the most impactful negative event that will happen to EA community in 2023?

Assessing the impact of Brazilian donors and EA community

We’re thinking about testing if our actions for promoting EA in this year (translations, meetings, networking...) have led to an observable increase in donations from Brazil - particularly outside the group of more "engaged" members. Even if we haven't observed an increase in high-quality engagement (such as GWWC pledges), we do see an increase in some "cheaper signals", such as the number of Facebook group members and the amount of donations to AMF (which, curiously, are concentrated in basically two metropolitan areas - Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre; I know there are some EAs living in Minas and in the North, but currently I'm not aware of any donation coming from Rio and Brasilia, despite them being high-income metropolitan area). We'd like to test if that's a coincidence.

I would appreciate any suggestion/help on that. I think it would demand more than EA survey data. First, we thought about requesting to EA charities data about the amount of donations:

1.1 from Brazil between Oct 23th, 2018 and Oct 23th, 2019 (controlling for month) with the amount of donations from the previous year;

1.2 from similar countries (I’m not sure which countries we should pick: Argentina, Chile, Mexico, S. Africa, Portugal?...China?), in the same periods – to check if any of them presented a similar increase/decrease.

Second, I wonder if we could get in touch with at least some identified donors and ask them how they came to the decision of donating. Possibly, tracking people using the names they provided to those websites might be considered too invasive, but I wonder if the organization itself could send an e-mail inviting them to get in touch with us.

I just answered to UNESCO Public Online Consultation on the draft of a Recommendation on AI Ethics - it was longer and more complex than I thought.

I'd really love to know what other EA's think of it. I'm very unsure about how useful it is going to be, particularly since US left the organization in 2018. But it's the first Recommendation of a UN agency on this, the text address many interesting points (despite greatly emphasizing short-term issues, it does address "long-term catastrophic harms"), I haven't seen many discussions of it (except for the Montreal AI Ethics Institute), and the deadline is July 31.

Let me share SBTi's requests for feeddback:

 

Are we in an Original Position regarding the interests of our descendants?

If you:

1. Had to make a decision about the basic structure of a society where your distant descendants will live (in 200 or 2000 years), and
2. only care about their welfare, and
3. don’t know (almost) anything about who they will be, how many, how their society will be structured, etc.,

Then you are under some sort of veil of ignorance, in a situation quite similar to Rawls’s Original Position… with one major difference: it’s not an abstract thought experiment for ideal political theory.

What led me to this is that I suspect that the welfare of my descendants will likely depend more on the basic structure of their society than on any amount of resources I try to transfer to them – but I’m not sure about that: there are some examples of successful transfers of great wealth through many generations.

I’m not sure Rawls’s theory of justice would follow from this, but it’s quite possible: when I have the welfare of a subset of unidentified individuals in the future in mind, I feel tempted to prefer that their society will abide by something like his two principles of justice. According to Harsanyi, it’s also tempting to prefer something like Average utilitarianism (which, in this context, converges to sum-utilitarianism, because we are abstracting away populational variations).

After thinking this, I didn’t see any major philosophical opinions changing in myself, but I was surprised that I never found any argument over this in the literature.

Maybe because it’s not such a good way of reasoning about future generations: there are more effective ways of improving future welfare than fostering political liberalism. But I guess this is the sort of reasoning we'd expect from something like a reciprocity-based theory of longtermism.

So, I saw Vox's article on how air filters create huge educational gains; I'm particularly surprised that indoor air quality (actually, indoor environmental conditions) is kinda neglected everywhere (except, maybe, in dagerous jobs). But then I saw this (convincing) critique of the underlying paper.

It seems to me that this is a suitable case for a blind RCT: you could install fake air filters in order to control for placebo effects, etc. But then I googled a little bit... and I haven't found significant studies using blind RCTs in social sciences and similar cases. I wonder why; at least for these cases, it doesn't seem more unethical or harder to do it than in medical trials.

My research group is designing a course on Global Risks for academic students in Brazil. I am looking for syllabi and teaching materials that could help inspire us. Right now I am using the WEF report, the Global Challenges report, the Legal Topics in Effective Altruism |and taking a look at the more practical topics in teaching materials from GPI. But I would like to see something from CSER, maybe? Anyone has any tips?

CONSTITUTIONALIZING THE LONG-TERM FUTURE - ESTABLISHING INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE IN NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONS

On Sep 19 and Sep 20

This conference might interest longtermists in general (and people in Legal Priorities especifically)

https://ifilnova.pt/en/events/constitutionalizing-the-long-term-future/

Two “non-spoilers” for the movie Oppenheimer

Since the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Elders have been talking about this lately…

1) "Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

The famous passage from Bhagavad Gita (BG), the Hindu religious epic. It suggests that Nolan is associating Oppie with the terrible form of Vishvaruppa – call this the “promethean” interpretation. But Oppie is actually more similar to prince Arjuna: the hero with a crisis of conscience who doesn't want to join the battlefield of Kurukshetra because it will bring incontrollable destruction - but ends up doing it anyway, because that's his destiny, as explained by Krishna / Vishnu, the "destroyer of worlds". This "fatalistic" interpretation is reinforced by other scenes – e.g., Oppie’s visions of destruction, and a conversation where President Truman basically tells Oppie that he’s not that important…

2) Fermi paradox

Enrico Fermi, one of the brightest among so many geniuses on screen, doesn't have enough screen time to state his famous paradox. Given that the universe is 13.7 bi years old, and that there are so many stars in the galaxy, and certainly many of them are able to evolve intelligent life just like ours…  where's everyone? certainly, we should be seeing evidence of alien life somewhere by now - like radio waves, space structures, or a party invitation. So, why this silence? Are aliens avoiding us?

One of the main explanations is that life might be self-defeating: as technology progress, the capacity of a species to destroy itself increases faster than the capacity to mitigate this risk.

So, ok, this movie is astonishing... but dear Chris Nolan, if you ever consider to extend it or turn it into a series... there are many things you might want to do. But two short scenes explaining for the viewer (1) the BG's quotation, and (2) Fermi's paradox would greatly improve the understanding of one the tenets of the movie - Oppie's concern that they may start an unstoppable “chain reaction that'll consume the world"

Essay Prize of the Portuguese Philosophy Society - Philosophical papers on Artificial intelligence I'm not sure this will interest top researchers in AI philosophy, but maybe someone might see this as a low-hanging fruit: the "PRÉMIO DE ENSAIO DA SOCIEDADE PORTUGUESA DE FILOSOFIA" of this year is about the challenges AI poses for "the philosophical understanding of the human".

"Que desafios pode a inteligência artificial colocar à compreensão filosófica do humano?” Link: https://www.spfil.pt/regulamento_premio_ensaio_spf deadline: feb 2023 prize: €3,000

Contigent conventions and the Tragedy of "Happy Birthday lock-in"

Will and Rob were talking about how the idea that there’s an inevitable convergence in moral values is wrong, and they mention some examples of contingencies. The first is the “Tragedy of ‘Happy Birthday’ lock-in”:

The melody for “Happy Birthday” is really atrocious. It’s like a dirge. It has this really large interval; no one can sing it. I can’t sing it. And so really, if you were going to pick a tune to be the most widely sung song in the world, it wouldn’t be that tune. Yet, it’s the one that took off, and it’s now in almost all major languages.

[Nuka zaria: change human trajectory by singing a different song for birthdays. My current suggestion is Weird Al Yankovic’s Happy Birthday, but maybe something for optimistic and simple would be nice, too.

(on the other hand, my new s-risk is that we shift to this other attractor that haunts Brazilian birthday parties)]

Their second example is neckties:

It’s such a bizarre item of clothing. There’s obviously no reason why wearing a bit of cloth around your neck would indicate status or prestige. We could have had different indicators of that. Yet that is, as a matter of fact, the thing that took off.

(Nuka zaria: let’s all shift to wearing bandanas or gaucho scarves, which are more convenient and useful.)

But then, Will says something that bothers me: “There’s just this fundamental arbitrariness.” One interpretation of this sentence is true: you can’t predict in advance what sort of fancy item of clothing an elite will adopt, or what melody will be the most executed in the world; i.e., it’s hard to predict what precise convention will emerge. But it’s certainly not true that you can’t explain them in hindsight (ok, hindsight is 20/20). Moreover, and here I take some risk, I think it’s not true that one can’t, in advance, identify features of what convention will be adopted – i.e., what counts as a salient point of attraction is not random.

The Hill sisters (a kindergarten principal and a composer) developed the song “Good morning to all” (a predecessor to "Happy Birthday to you") as something that children would find easy to sing – i.e., they optimized for simplicity and used good old trial and error. Thus, it probably became so popular precisely because kids loved it, and because nowadays birthday parties are made for kids to feel special. That's not what I would call "arbitrary" - it's certainly not random.

I think the explanation for neckties is a bit different. The French liked the knotted neckerchiefs of Croatian mercenaries, and as Louis XIII and Louis XIV started wearing lace cravats, the nobility followed through. So what began as a useful piece of cloth to close your jacket ended up being copied by a foreign elite because it was seen as a fancy ornament; and then it evolved to more and more complex designs precisely to signal its decorative function, so distinguishing the upper class from the commoner. Again, I wouldn't call it random.

This, I guess, is good news: arbitrariness is not so pervasive that we cannot consciously influence the future.

Is this a setback in animal welfare laws? https://www.publico.pt/2023/01/18/sociedade/noticia/ministerio-publico-pede-inconstitucionalidade-norma-lei-maus-tratos-animais-2035566 I was surprised that Portuguese constitutional legal doctrine prevented criminalizing torturing animals

https://www.tribunalconstitucional.pt/tc/acordaos/20210867.html There are quite definitive precedents

Might"A Beacon in the Galaxy" be our new "Three-body problem" (by Cixin Liu)

This paper proposes to transmit an "updated Arecibo-like" message to a star cluster near the galaxy’s center, a  "selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely for life to have developed". 
Caleb Schwarf summarizes the issue here.  Even if we set aside the possibility of conflict, maybe discussions on Space Governance should include how we might communicate with other types of intelligent life, like "at least don't mention that we kill animals".

Is inequality neglected in EA?

I am inclined to answer "no," because I've seen the subject pop in some discussions on economics in this Forum... on the other hand, I've also seen some EAs disregard matters of economic distribution as secondary - if not an obstacle to economic progress. I remember seeing this subject figure in some critiques to the movement or mentioned en passant when the subject is billionaires' philanthropy. Anyway, I'd like to document and share here some of my impressions resulting from a 30min search on the subject.

My attention was recently drawn to the matter thanks to this survey showing a consensus in IGM Forum (from *before* the pandemic – though the results were just released this week) that inequality of income and wealth is a danger to capitalism and to democracy. It fits CORE's survey among students on "what is the most pressing problem economists should address". Though it is evidence of the importance of the matter, it also suggests that it's not neglected.
 

Of course, inequality is particularly relevant to studying and fighting poverty - as shown in this post from GWWC' Hazell and Holmes. However, the subject probably impacts the trajectory of our societies, as this kind of neglected GPI working paper / forum post argues that “we have instrumental reason to reduce economic inequality based on its intertemporal effects in the short, medium and the very long term” […] “because greater inequality could increase existential risk".

Global Ultra High Net Worth Individuals fell by 6% this year, according to Wealth-X - after steady increases in the last few years. Thus, I'm afraid the lack of funding from SBF may be the beginning of a trend - at least for community building and longtermism 

Does anyone have any idea / info on what proportion of the infected cases are getting Covid19 inside hospitals?

(Epistemic status: low, but I didin't find any research on that, so the hypothesis deserves a bit more of attention)

1. Nosocomial infections are serious business. Hospitals are basically big buildings full of dying people and the stressed personel who goes from one bed to another try to avoid it. Throw a deadly and very contagious virus in it, and it becomes a slaughterhouse.

2. Previous coronavirus were rapidly spread in hospitals and other care units. That made South East Asia kinda prepared for possibly similar epidemics (maybe I'm wrong, but in news their medical staff is always in Hazmat suits, unlike most Health workers in the West). Maybe this is a neglected point in the successful approach in South East Asia?

3. I know hospitals have serious protocols to avoid it... but it takes only a few careless cleaning staff, or a patient's relatives going to cafeteria, or a badly designed airflow, to ruin everything. Just one Hospital chain in Brazil concentrates most of deaths in Sao Paulo, and 40% of the total national.

IMF climate change challenge "How might we integrate climate change into economic analysis to promote green policies?

To help answer this question, the IMF is organizing an innovation challenge on the economic and financial stability aspects of climate change." https://lnkd.in/dCbZX-B

Is there some tension between population ethics + hedonic utilitarianism and the premises people in wild animal suffering use (e.g., negative utilitarianism, or the negative welfare expectancy of wild animals) to argue against rewilding (and in favor of environment destruction)?

Is there anything like a public repository / document listing articles and discussions on social discount rates (similar to what we have for iidm)? (I mean, I have downloaded a lot of papers on this - Stern, Nordhaus, Greaves, Weitzman, Posner etc. - and there many lit reviews, but I wonder if someone is already approaching it in a more organized way)

Why aren't social discount rates object of political debates? I mean, this subject is not more complex than other themes in legislation and policy.

Future of Life Institute is looking for translators!
(Forwarded from FLI's Newsletter)
The outreach team is now recruiting Spanish and Portuguese speakers for translation work!
The goal is to make our social media content accessible to our rapidly growing audience in Central America, South America, and Mexico. The translator would be sent between one and five posts a week for translation. In general, these snippets of text would only be as long as a single tweet.
We prefer a commitment of two hours per week but do not expect the work to exceed one hour per week. The hourly compensation is $15. Depending on outcomes for this project, the role may be short-term.
https://lnkd.in/d5YqX-h
For more details and to apply, please fill out this form. We are also registering other languages for future opportunities so those with fluency in other languages may fill out this form as well.

Not super-effective, but given Sanjay's post on ESG, maybe there are people interested:
Ethics and Trust in Finance 8th Global Prize
The Prize is a project of the Observatoire de la Finance (Geneva), a non-profit foundation, working since 1996 on the relationship between the ethos of financial activities and its impact on society. The Observatoire aims to raise awareness of the need to pursue the common good through reconciling the good of persons, organizations, and community. 
[...]
The 8th edition (2020-2021) of the Prize was officially launched on 2 June 2020. The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2021. The Prize is open to people under the age of 35 working in or studying finance. Register here for entry into the competition. All essays submitted to the Prize are assessed by the Jury, comprising academics and professional experts.

How to register • Ethics & Trust in Finance

ethicsinfinance.org • 1 min de leitura

Fill the form expressing your interest and we will send you the rules of the competition.

IMF Blogpost: Social Repercussions of Pandemics - By Philip Barrett, Sophia Chen, and Nan Li

Or something Peter Turchin would agree with:

But looking beyond the immediate aftermath, the risk of social unrest spikes in the longer term. Using information on the types of unrest, the IMF staff study focuses on the form that unrest typically takes after an epidemic. This analysis shows that, over time, the risk of riots and anti-government demonstrations rises. Furthermore, the study finds evidence of heightened risk of a major government crisis—an event that threatens to bring down the government and that typically occurs in the two years following a severe epidemic.

If history is a predictor, unrest may reemerge as the pandemic eases. The threats may be bigger where the crisis exposes or exacerbates pre-existing problems such as a lack of trust in institutions, poor governance, poverty, or inequality.

'Good' news: as expected, as real interest rates fall, so do SDR, increasing the social cost of carbon. (not novelty, ok, but monetary policy-makers explicitly acknowledging it seems to be good)
Bad news: of course, it still seems to be higher than a normative SDR based on time-neutrality.

Legal personality & AI systems

From the first draft of the UNESCO Recommendation on AI Ethics:

Policy Action 11: Ensuring Responsibility, Accountability and Privacy 94. Member States should review and adapt, as appropriate, regulatory and legal frameworks to achieve accountability and responsibility for the content and outcomes of AI systems at the different phases of their lifecycle. Governments should introduce liability frameworks or clarify the interpretation of existing frameworks to make it possible to attribute accountability for the decisions and behaviour of AI systems. When developing regulatory frameworks governments should, in particular, take into account that responsibility and accountability must always lie with a natural or legal person; responsibility should not be delegated to an AI system, nor should a legal personality be given to an AI system.

I see the point in the last sentence is to prevent individuals and companies from escaping liability due to AI failures. However, the last bit also seems to prevent us from creating some sort of "AI DAO" - i.e., from creating a legal entity totally implemented by an autonomous system. This doesn't seem reasonable; after all, what is company if not some sort of artificial agent?

Does anyone know or have a serious opinion / analysis on the European campaign to tax meat? I read some news at Le Monde, but nothing EA-level seriousness. I mean, it seems a pretty good idea, but I saw no data on possible impact, probability of adoption, possible ways to contribute, or even possible side-effects?

(not the best comparison, but worth noting: in Brazil a surge in meat prices caused an inflation peak in december and corroded the governement's support - yeah, people can tolerate politicians meddling with criminals and fascism, as long as they can have barbecue)

I was reading this recommended book and wondering how much of the late changes in our world is due to the demographic transitions - i.e., boomers. We know the population pyramid shape affects unemployment rates, wealth concentration (morever, think about how income predicts life expectancy, at least in very unequal countries - so one can expect a higher proportion of wealthier individuals in old age), and maybe even increasing health costs and votes - e.g., I just confirmed that, in Brazil, opinions about the government among young and old people are symmetrically opposite.

Idk what to infer from here. It seems to me there's an elephant in the room: I read a lot about economics, philosophy and politics, and I've seen almost no mention of it but for discussions over one of those topics alone - never something concerning all of them. But I do think this should interest EAs, because much of our economic and political theory fails to account for an aging population - something quite remarkable in human history. So, I'd appreciate any tip to read something that takes demography seriously (except for Peter Turchin, whom I already follow).

Time to cancel my Asterisk subscription?

So Asterisk dedicates a whole self-aggrandizing issue to California, leaves EV for Obelus (what is Obelus?), starts charging readers, and, worst of all, celebrates low prices for eggs and milk?