This is a special post for quick takes by Agnes Stenlund. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
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Forum team update: Shortform is now called “Quick takes”, has a section on the Frontpage, and changed in some other smaller ways.
Here’s what’s new:
- Shortform is now called “Quick takes” (Shortform was confusing to many people)
- There’s a section for Quick takes on the Frontpage to improve visibility (you can still post Quick takes that don’t show up on the Frontpage; just deselect the “Frontpage” tag). Those will only show up in the separate view
- Some other design changes to make things clearer and easier to use:
- There’s an input field in the section on the Frontpage, so you can add a Quick take there directly
- Improvements to the page where all of an author’s Quick takes are shown
- Other visual changes to the Quick takes and the creation flow
Rationale/context:
In some cases, Forum users want to share (and read) less polished ideas or other content that doesn’t seem like a full post on the Forum. Shortform was designed years back to fill this gap, but the Shortform feature was tucked away, hard to read, and had a name that most users didn’t understand.
Over the past few months, we’ve been exploring ways to encourage lower-barrier discussions, culminating in this latest version of Quick takes.
As always, we’d love feedback on these changes. You can comment on my Quick take (or email us if you prefer). We’ll also monitor how this feature gets used and improve it over time.
This seems like an improvement to me. Thanks!
Feedback on a minor pain point for me. When I'm looking at quick takes on the front page and want to go to the permalink for the relevant take (e.g. to see all the discussion under it), I often look around for a big title to click on for a while before remembering that I'm supposed to click on the icon on the top right, which is small, doesn't stand out much, and feels too me like it's somehow violating an implicit expectation I have for where to find this for this kind of content.
I have no clue whether this is just me, whether this is worth addressing, or what a good solution would be. (It does make sense to me that quick takes don't have big titles like a normal top level post would.)
Curated and popular this week
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Confidence: Medium, underlying data is patchy and relies on a good amount of guesswork, data work involved a fair amount of vibecoding.
Intro:
Tom Davidson has an excellent post explaining the compute bottleneck objection to the software-only intelligence explosion.[1] The rough idea is that AI research requires two inputs: cognitive labor and research compute. If these two inputs are gross complements, then even if there is recursive self-improvement in the amount of cognitive labor directed towards AI research, this process will fizzle as you get bottlenecked by the amount of research compute.
The compute bottleneck objection to the software-only intelligence explosion crucially relies on compute and cognitive labor being gross complements; however, this fact is not at all obvious. You might think compute and cognitive labor are gross substitutes because more labor can substitute for a higher quantity of experiments via more careful experimental design or selection of experiments. Or you might indeed think they are gross complements because eventually, ideas need to be tested out in compute-intensive, experimental verification.
Ideally, we could use empirical evidence to get some clarity on whether compute and cognitive labor are gross complements; however, the existing empirical evidence is weak. The main empirical estimate that is discussed in Tom's article is Oberfield and Raval (2014), which estimates the elasticity of substitution (the standard measure of whether goods are complements or substitutes) between capital and labor in manufacturing plants. It is not clear how well we can extrapolate from manufacturing to AI research.
In this article, we will try to remedy this by estimating the elasticity of substitution between research compute and cognitive labor in frontier AI firms.
Model
Baseline CES in Compute
To understand how we estimate the elasticity of substitution, it will be useful to set up a theoretical model of researching better alg
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TLDR: This 6 million dollar Technical Support Unit grant doesn’t seem to fit GiveWell’s ethos and mission, and I don’t think the grant has high expected value.
Disclaimer: Despite my concerns I still think this grant is likely better than 80% of Global Health grants out there. GiveWell are my favourite donor, and given how much thought, research, and passion goes into every grant they give, I’m quite likely to be wrong here!
What makes GiveWell Special?
I love to tell people what makes GiveWell special. I giddily share how they rigorously select the most cost-effective charities with the best evidence-base. GiveWell charities almost certainly save lives at low cost – you can bank on it. There’s almost no other org in the world where you can be pretty sure every few thousand dollars donated be savin’ dem lives.
So GiveWell Gives you certainty – at least as much as possible.
However this grant supports a high-risk intervention with a poor evidence base. There are decent arguments for moonshot grants which try and shift the needle high up in a health system, but this “meta-level”, “weak evidence”, “hits-based” approach feels more Open-Phil than GiveWell[1]. If a friend asks me to justify the last 10 grants GiveWell made based on their mission and process, I’ll grin and gladly explain. I couldn’t explain this one.
Although I prefer GiveWell’s “nearly sure” approach[2], it could be healthy to have two organisations with different roles in the EA global Health ecosystem. GiveWell backing sure things, and OpenPhil making bets.
GiveWell vs. OpenPhil Funding Approach
What is the grant?
The grant is a joint venture with OpenPhil[3] which gives 6 million dollars to two generalist “BINGOs”[4] (CHAI and PATH), to provide technical support to low-income African countries. This might help them shift their health budgets from less effective causes to more effective causes, and find efficient ways to cut costs without losing impact in these leaner times. Teams of 3-5
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We’re excited to announce SparkWell!
What is SparkWell?
SparkWell is an Anti Entropy program designed to help high-impact nonprofit projects test ideas, develop operational capabilities, and launch as independent entities. We provide a temporary home for a diverse range of promising initiatives.
Why have we built this?
We believe that we’re living through a transformational period in history. Catastrophic risks loom large, whether from climate change, factory farming, pandemics, nuclear or cyber warfare, or the misalignment or misuse of intelligent systems.
A transformational period in history warrants a transformation in philanthropy — and we want to give innovative projects the support they need to test their ideas and scale. We leverage our skills and experience with nonprofit operations to guide enrolled projects through a bespoke acceleration roadmap.
Within 6–24 months, your project will graduate into an independent entity with operational best practices. This will put you in a position to scale your activities — and help mitigate the catastrophic risks facing us.
What does SparkWell offer?
SparkWell offers 6-month, 12-month, or 24-month tracks to accommodate projects at different stages. We enable each project to:
* Test ideas
* Receive tax-exempt funding via Anti Entropy's 501(c)(3)
* Run your project, including hiring staff, contractors, and managing expenses
* Receive feedback and develop your theory of change
* Develop operational capabilities
* Access your bank account, company card, and dashboard
* Receive mentorship and resources from your Project Liaison
* Leave bookkeeping and compliance to us
* Launch an independent entity
* Monitor your progress along entity formation milestones
* Be on track to independence within 6, 12, or 24 months
* Launch an independent entity when you’re ready
We apply a 7% service fee on funds raised or received during the program. You can learn more about the program here.
Who are
Forum team update: Shortform is now called “Quick takes”, has a section on the Frontpage, and changed in some other smaller ways.
Here’s what’s new:
Rationale/context:
In some cases, Forum users want to share (and read) less polished ideas or other content that doesn’t seem like a full post on the Forum. Shortform was designed years back to fill this gap, but the Shortform feature was tucked away, hard to read, and had a name that most users didn’t understand.
Over the past few months, we’ve been exploring ways to encourage lower-barrier discussions, culminating in this latest version of Quick takes.
As always, we’d love feedback on these changes. You can comment on my Quick take (or email us if you prefer). We’ll also monitor how this feature gets used and improve it over time.
This is a good design because it’s quite standard across a few websites (social media and fora) that timestamps are links to permalinks.