TL;DR
* GOAL 3 is a social enterprise that created IMPALA, a patient monitoring and digital platform system for low-resource settings. There is also a GOAL 3 foundation that raises funds to ensure underserved communities will be reached.
* A recently completed report from Rethink Priorities calculated IMPALA to have a cost per DALY averted of $7–17 in paediatr...
This month effective altruism has gotten lots of attention, including a cover story in The Economist. It feels pretty surreal to be on the receiving end of it. But I feel grateful these ideas have caught on, and even more grateful for the drive, earnestness, and compassion of so many people who took strange but well-argued ideas seriously and then actually acted on them....
Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
Happy Ozone Day!
The Montreal Protocol, a universally ratified treaty phasing out the use of ozone-destroying CFCs, was signed 37 years ago today.
It remains one of the greatest examples of international cooperation to date.
It turned out to be a very easily solvable problem (heavily concentrated industry, very few production plants, technological substitution being very easy).
I think the Montreal Protocol is often misunderstood to be a great success story / positively indicative reference class for much harder problems like climate, AI, etc., biosecurity, when it really is an example of an exceptionally easy problem to solve.
Sure, but it still required a joint decision and international cooperation.
AI is also a heavily concentrated industry with only has a handful of labs with frontier models all in the same country. You could fairly easily largely pause them for a little while at least if you wanted to. I'm not saying this is a good idea or that itwould solve alignment, but it wouldn't actually be that hard.
I think it's helpful to look at successes even if there's aren't so many parallels with current big problems. We can underrate how doable big problems are if the political will is there.