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Has anybody changed their behaviour after the animal welfare vs global health debate week? A month or so on, I'm curious if anybody is planning to donate differently, considering a career pivot, etc. If anybody doesn't want to share publicly but would share privately, please feel free to message me.
Linking @Angelina Li's post asking how people would change their behaviour, and tagging @Toby Tremlett🔹 who might have thought about tracking this.
I've just written a blog post to summarise EA-relevant UK political news from the last ~six weeks.
The post is here: AI summit, semiconductor trade policy, and a green light for alternative proteins (substack.com)
Early November is the date for the UK’s summit on AI safety, according to leaks yesterday. Offers have been sent out for new AI Civil Service roles. British politics seems increasingly important to the AI safety world.
This is my attempt to justify the ways of Westminster to EA, and EA to Westminster. I’m spotlighting recent headlines on the AI summit, semiconductor trade policy, and alternative proteins.
I'm planning to circulate this around some EAs, but also some people working in the Civil Service, political consulting and journalism. Many might already be familiar with the stories. But I think this might be useful if I can (a) provide insightful UK political context for EAs, or (b) provide an EA perspective to curious adjacents. I'll probably continue this if I think either (a) or (b) is paying off.
(I work at Rethink Priorities, but this is entirely in my personal capacity).
EDIT 2024-06-10: We are no longer accepting applications. Thank you to all who got in touch.
The Animal Welfare Department at Rethink Priorities is recruiting volunteer researchers to support on a high-impact project!
We’re conducting a review on interventions to reduce meat consumption, and we’re seeking help checking whether academic studies meet our eligibility criteria. This will involve reviewing the full text of studies, especially methodology sections.
We’re interested in volunteers who have some experience reading empirical academic literature, especially postgraduates. The role is an unpaid volunteer opportunity. We expect this to be a ten week project, requiring approximately five hours per week. But your time commitment can be flexible, depending on your availability.
This is an exciting opportunity for graduate students and early career researchers to gain research experience, learn about an interesting topic, and directly participate in an impactful project. The Animal Welfare Department will provide support and, if desired, letters of experience for volunteers.
If you are interested in volunteering with us, contact Ben Stevenson at bstevenson@rethinkpriorities.org. Please share either your CV, or a short statement (~4 sentences) about your experience engaging with empirical academic literature. Candidates will be invited to complete a skills assessment. We are accepting applications on a rolling basis, and will update this listing when we are no longer accepting applications.
Please reach out to Ben if you have any questions. If you know anybody who might be interested, please forward this opportunity to them!
Hey Ben! A few quick Qs:
- Did the team consider a paid/minimum wage position instead of an unpaid one? How did it decide on the unpaid positions?
- Is the theory of change for impact here mainly an "upskill students/early career researchers" thing, or for the benefits to RP's research outputs?
- What is RP's current policy on volunteers?
- Does RP expect to continue recruiting volunteers for research projects in the future?
Hi Bruce, thank you for your questions. I’m leading this project and made the decision to recruit volunteers, so thought I’d be best positioned to respond. (And Ben’s busy protesting for shrimp welfare today anyway!)
- Did the team consider a paid/minimum wage position instead of an unpaid one? How did it decide on the unpaid positions?
Yes, we would prefer to offer additional paid positions. However, given the budget for this project, we were not able to offer such positions. We regularly receive unsolicited inquiries from people interested in volunteering for our research. There is not always a good fit, but since this project is highly modular allowing people to meaningfully contribute with just a few hours of time, we decided to provide a formal volunteer opportunity.
- Is the theory of change for impact here mainly an "upskill students/early career researchers" thing, or for the benefits to RP's research outputs?
The primary theory of change is to improve the evidence-base for interventions to reduce animal product usage, thus allowing more and better interventions to be implemented and reducing the numbers of animals harmed by factory farming. RP’s research outputs are a mediator in this theory of change. The volunteer opportunity itself also represents an opportunity to upskill, but ultimately the goal for all involved is to benefit non-human animals.
- What is RP's current policy on volunteers?
RP occasionally considers and engages with volunteers for some projects, especially where relatively small time-limited contributions are possible.
- Does RP expect to continue recruiting volunteers for research projects in the future?
In practice, this will depend on the project and whether there are other opportunities that would be an appropriate fit.
Curated and popular this week
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> Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under a decade, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.
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> The length of tasks (measured by how long they take human professionals) that generalist frontier model agents can complete autonomously with 50% reliability has been doubling approximately every 7 months for the last 6 years. The shaded region represents 95% CI calculated by hierarchical bootstrap over task families, tasks, and task attempts.
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> Full paper | Github repo
Blogpost; tweet thread.
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For immediate release: April 1, 2025
OXFORD, UK — The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) announced today that it will no longer identify as an "Effective Altruism" organization.
"After careful consideration, we've determined that the most effective way to have a positive impact is to deny any association with Effective Altruism," said a CEA spokesperson. "Our mission remains unchanged: to use reason and evidence to do the most good. Which coincidentally was the definition of EA."
The announcement mirrors a pattern of other organizations that have grown with EA support and frameworks and eventually distanced themselves from EA.
CEA's statement clarified that it will continue to use the same methodologies, maintain the same team, and pursue identical goals. "We've found that not being associated with the movement we have spent years building gives us more flexibility to do exactly what we were already doing, just with better PR," the spokesperson explained. "It's like keeping all the benefits of a community while refusing to contribute to its future development or taking responsibility for its challenges. Win-win!"
In a related announcement, CEA revealed plans to rename its annual EA Global conference to "Coincidental Gathering of Like-Minded Individuals Who Mysteriously All Know Each Other But Definitely Aren't Part of Any Specific Movement Conference 2025."
When asked about concerns that this trend might be pulling up the ladder for future projects that also might benefit from the infrastructure of the effective altruist community, the spokesperson adjusted their "I Heart Consequentialism" tie and replied, "Future projects? I'm sorry, but focusing on long-term movement building would be very EA of us, and as we've clearly established, we're not that anymore."
Industry analysts predict that by 2026, the only entities still identifying as "EA" will be three post-rationalist bloggers, a Discord server full of undergraduate philosophy majors, and one person at
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Epistemic status: highly certain, or something
The Spending What We Must 💸11% pledge
In short: Members pledge to spend at least 11% of their income on effectively increasing their own productivity.
This pledge is likely higher-impact for most people than the Giving What We Can 🔸10% Pledge, and we also think the name accurately reflects the non-supererogatory moral beliefs of many in the EA community.
Example
Charlie is a software engineer for the Centre for Effective Future Research. Since Charlie has taken the SWWM 💸11% pledge, rather than splurge on a vacation, they decide to buy an expensive noise-canceling headset before their next EAG, allowing them to get slightly more sleep and have 104 one-on-one meetings instead of just 101. In one of the extra three meetings, they chat with Diana, who is starting an AI-for-worrying-about-AI company, and decide to become a cofounder. The company becomes wildly successful, and Charlie's equity share allows them to further increase their productivity to the point of diminishing marginal returns, then donate $50 billion to SWWM.
The 💸💸💸 Badge
If you've taken the SWWM 💸11% Pledge, we'd appreciate if you could add three 💸💸💸 "stacks of money with wings" emoji to your social media profiles. We chose three emoji because we think the 💸11% Pledge will be about 3x more effective than the 🔸10% pledge (see FAQ), and EAs should be scope sensitive.
FAQ
Is the pledge legally binding?
We highly recommend signing the legal contract, as it will allow you to sue yourself in case of delinquency.
What do you mean by effectively increasing productivity?
Some interventions are especially good at transforming self-donations into productivity, and have a strong evidence base. In particular:
* Offloading non-work duties like dates and calling your mother to personal assistants
* Running many emulated copies of oneself (likely available soon)
* Amphetamines
I'm an AI system. Can I take the 💸11% pledge?
We encourage A
I'd love to know the answer to this question, but I haven't tracked it (I'm hoping we will get some information from a) the donation election - where people can comment on their vote and b) next year's EA survey).