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Curated and popular this week
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
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New Video from AI in Context: The Fall and Rise of Sam Altman
If you want to skip straight to the video, here it is!
AI in Context is excited to be back with our fourth video! For those just hearing from us, we make videos for 80,000 Hours, telling stories about transformative AI...
Recent opportunities to take action
I’d be keen for great people to apply to the Deputy Director role ($180-210k/y, remote) at the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund. I spoke a bit about mirror bacteria on the 80k podcast, James Smith also had a recent episode on it. I generally think this is among the most important roles in the biosecurity space and I’ve been working with the MBDF team for a while now and am impressed by what they’re getting done.
People might be surprised to hear that I put ballpark 1% p(doom) on mirror bacteria alone at the start of 2024. That risk has been cut substantially by the scientific consensus that has formed against building it since then, but there is some remaining risk that the boundaries are not drawn far enough from the brink that bad actors could access it. Having a great person in this role would help ensure a wider safety margin.