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Curated and popular this week
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Edit: The match seems to now be over - the funds were expended in around 35 minutes. But many of these charities are great and should be supported regardless!
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On October 22nd starting at 10:00am Pacific Time, Every.org is matching donations to select animal welfare organizations at a 2:1 rate, up to $2,000 per donor per nonprofit (so if you give up to $2,000, they will contribute up to $4,000 and the nonprofit will get up to $6,000). The first donation a donor makes to each el...
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‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’
J Dmitri Gallow
Epistemic status
I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall nature of its contents based on my strong impression from the subset of work that I’ve read. I’ve recently spent maybe 2–300 hours lear...
Recent opportunities to take action
Three social forces at the root of FTX's collapse
Hi folks, I shared some thoughts I wrote up about Sam Bankman-Fried. I worry that there's a bit of a social cascade that's leading us to draw the wrong lessons from what happened. I'm not 100% confident in either the facts of what happened -- though, as a former securities litigator in the post 2008 period, I think I have more experience than most -- but I don't see a particularly compelling case for fraud. I also think the focus on a single person's supposed indiscretions, whether true or otherwise, may distract us from deeper systemic problems that FTX's collapse represents.
Very interested in others' thoughts, and especially thoughts on my diagnosis of cultural norms in EA that may have contributed to the problem at FTX. Here's the link:
https://simpleheart.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-sam-bankman-fried
Haha, I wrote a similarly titled article sharing the premise that Sam's actions seem more indicative of a mistake than a fraud: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/w6aLsNppuwnqccHmC/in-defense-of-sbf
I appreciated the personal notes about SBFs interactions with the animal welfare community. I do think the tribalism EA tribalism element is very real as well. Also appreciate the point about trying to work on something intrinsically motivating - I'm not sure that it's possible for every individual but I do feel like my own intrinsic love of work helps a lot with putting in a lot of time and effort!
Great post.