TL;DR
NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda.
We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership wi...
This summer, 27 residents came to Berkeley for the first cohort of the Generator Residency, a three-month program for AI safety generalists run by Kairos and Constellation.
Residents receive mentorship from experienced generalists and researchers and are working on projects like running workshops for professionals entering AI safety, building a cross-org...
A tough lesson I learned over the past few years is that it’s pretty stressful to work in the “Please Don’t Build the Torment Nexus” ecosystem, especially as it increasingly seems like the world is hell-bent on building the Torment Nexus.
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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.