Comments
How many submissions do you think the Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews contest received? I see 17 posted publicly here, which seems really low to me.
Curated and popular this week
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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
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TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
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Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
A small exercise to inspire empathy/gratitude for people who grew up with access to healthcare:
If you'd lived 150 years ago, what might you have died of as a child?
I got pneumonia when I was four and it probably would have killed me without modern medicine.
I would have died as a baby - I needed a complex heart operation.