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Has anyone doing EA Outreach looked at Neil Halloran?
He makes online documentaries that are high quality and well researched.
His nuclear war video seems relevant to x-risk.
https://youtu.be/Z3RzNEzJyzo?t=304
His global warming video get into epistemics and theory of science.
https://youtu.be/R7FAAfK78_M?t=1110
The viewership is ~1M to >10M.
His Patreon suggests financial support might be as low as 6 figures.
REQUEST FEEDBACK ON MY COMMENTS/FORUM BEHAVIOR:
I’m somewhat concerned about my activities on the forum.
The deepest reason is that I’m worried that I’m not as virtuous as I may seem to myself when communicating.
I am also worried about message quality. Someone sent me this message, I am grateful and I trust them.
The message was about lengthy messages, but it seems reasonable there could be an implicit concern about other issues.
I am looking for feedback:
- I welcome direct written feedback from anyone reading my comments
- Also, I have setup a "comment" voting system for you to send feedback anonymously, just upvote the comment that best describes your opinion
My own hot take:
I think your comments are on average decent. I don't think you need to change them dramatically in any direction. I think the EA Forum is a fairly decent training ground for thinking in certain useful ways about EA. Skimming some of your old comments, I think you've improved noticeably already. I think you will naturally improve more as you receive more engagement, and also as you think more about EA issues.
I'm personally pretty bullish about EA Forum and other public online communication, and am confused why other people don't do it more, especially people in training who want to do professional EA work. My naive, independent, impression is that public online comms is good for skill-building for research. E.g., an econ PhD who wants a research job at Open Phil or GiveWell and currently spend 50 hours/week on their direct PhD work would be better off spending 45h/week on their PhD and 5h/week writing research blog posts and engaging on the Forum*. I think the actual cost-benefits ratio is stronger, as I expect the marginal hour of engagement on the Forum to be less psychologically costly for most people than most academic research work.** So the costs are lower and the marginal gains are higher.
Yet very few people do this, despite people often saying they want research jobs in EA. Other EA researchers also seem to recommend public communications less than I do. So my model is confused.
I do think rewriting comments may be helpful in some cases. Especially longer comments. I wish I'm better at this myself, but as I frequently told my interns, a guiding principle is "do as I say, not as I do." But I think you will naturally improve over time even without doing that.
*entirely from a skill-building perspective, and assuming that a) employers never read the forum and b) that the direct impact of forum posts are useless, both of which I think is false. If you include those factors, they should probably add to rather than decrease the value of forum publications.
**though I guess many academics use Twitter instead for their public communication?
To get honest feedback, consider allowing people to send you feedback anonymously. You can e.g. use a Google Form or Admonymous.
With that said, I personally didn't notice any issues with the length of your comments.
QUESTION: What friendly, easy going and engaging material would you give to a high schooler as an "intro to programming"?
BACKGROUND:
I just became speaker for a talk tomorrow on "Data Science and AI" (a friend pulled out and they needed me).
This is for high schoolers.
Basically, as one of the talking points I want to give, I want to tell people that programming and understanding how to code and build things, is going to be really valuable. (Especially since AI and data science is sort of vague and the "high end stuff" hard to access or even irrelevant.)
So as part of this, I want to give them some concrete material or task to do to give them a sense of programming or spark their interest. What should this material or task be? Again, this is high schoolers and it should be friendly.
Curated and popular this week
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Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way.
Summary
While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise:
1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015.
2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010.
3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.
I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.
Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.
Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.
Introduction
In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000:
Giving What We Can said that
> The reduction in malaria has be
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"Part one of our challenge is to solve the technical alignment problem, and that’s what everybody focuses on, but part two is: to whose values do you align the system once you’re capable of doing that, and that may turn out to be an even harder problem", Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO (Link).
In this post, I argue that:
1. "To whose values do you align the system" is a critically neglected space I termed “Moral Alignment.” Only a few organizations work for non-humans in this field, with a total budget of 4-5 million USD (not accounting for academic work). The scale of this space couldn’t be any bigger - the intersection between the most revolutionary technology ever and all sentient beings. While tractability remains uncertain, there is some promising positive evidence (See “The Tractability Open Question” section).
2. Given the first point, our movement must attract more resources, talent, and funding to address it. The goal is to value align AI with caring about all sentient beings: humans, animals, and potential future digital minds. In other words, I argue we should invest much more in promoting a sentient-centric AI.
The problem
What is Moral Alignment?
AI alignment focuses on ensuring AI systems act according to human intentions, emphasizing controllability and corrigibility (adaptability to changing human preferences). However, traditional alignment often ignores the ethical implications for all sentient beings. Moral Alignment, as part of the broader AI alignment and AI safety spaces, is a field focused on the values we aim to instill in AI. I argue that our goal should be to ensure AI is a positive force for all sentient beings.
Currently, as far as I know, no overarching organization, terms, or community unifies Moral Alignment (MA) as a field with a clear umbrella identity. While specific groups focus individually on animals, humans, or digital minds, such as AI for Animals, which does excellent community-building work around AI and animal welfare while
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Many thanks to Constance Li, Rachel Mason, Ronen Bar, Sam Tucker-Davis, and Yip Fai Tse for providing valuable feedback. This post does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
Artificial General Intelligence (basically, ‘AI that is as good as, or better than, humans at most intellectual tasks’) seems increasingly likely to be developed in the next 5-10 years. As others have written, this has major implications for EA priorities, including animal advocacy, but it’s hard to know how this should shape our strategy. This post sets out a few starting points and I’m really interested in hearing others’ ideas, even if they’re very uncertain and half-baked.
Is AGI coming in the next 5-10 years?
This is very well covered elsewhere but basically it looks increasingly likely, e.g.:
* The Metaculus and Manifold forecasting platforms predict we’ll see AGI in 2030 and 2031, respectively.
* The heads of Anthropic and OpenAI think we’ll see it by 2027 and 2035, respectively.
* A 2024 survey of AI researchers put a 50% chance of AGI by 2047, but this is 13 years earlier than predicted in the 2023 version of the survey.
* These predictions seem feasible given the explosive rate of change we’ve been seeing in computing power available to models, algorithmic efficiencies, and actual model performance (e.g., look at how far Large Language Models and AI image generators have come just in the last three years).
* Based on this, organisations (both new ones, like Forethought, and existing ones, like 80,000 Hours) are taking the prospect of near-term AGI increasingly seriously.
What could AGI mean for animals?
AGI’s implications for animals depend heavily on who controls the AGI models. For example:
* AGI might be controlled by a handful of AI companies and/or governments, either in alliance or in competition.
* For example, maybe two government-owned companies separately develop AGI then restrict others from developing it.
* These actors’ use of AGI might be dr
Has anyone doing EA Outreach looked at Neil Halloran?
He makes online documentaries that are high quality and well researched.
His nuclear war video seems relevant to x-risk.
https://youtu.be/Z3RzNEzJyzo?t=304
His global warming video get into epistemics and theory of science.
https://youtu.be/R7FAAfK78_M?t=1110
The viewership is ~1M to >10M.
His Patreon suggests financial support might be as low as 6 figures.
https://www.patreon.com/neilhalloran
His climate change video is good!
He also has another one from 2 weeks ago, basically saying he probably exaggerated the risks and neither nuclear war nor climate change pose an extinction risk.