This is a special post for quick takes by John Salter. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Sorted by Click to highlight new quick takes since:

It seems that part of the reason communism is so widely discredited is the clear contrast between neighboring countries that pursued more free-market policies. This makes me wonder— practicality aside, what would happen if effective altruists concentrated all their global health and development efforts into a single country, using  similar neighboring countries as the comparison group?

Given that EA-driven philanthropy accounts for only about 0.02% of total global aid, perhaps the influence EA's approach could have by definitively proving its impact would be greater than trying to maximise the good it does directly.

This is a really interesting idea and would obviously need a relatively uncorrupt country that is on board with the project. 

To some extent this kind of thing already happens, with aid organisations focusing their funding on countries which use it well. Rwanda is an interesting example of this over the last 20 years as they have attracted huge foreign funding after their dictator basically fixed low level corruption and organized the country surprisingly well. This has led to dis proportionate improvements in healthcare and education compared with surrounding countries, although economically the jury is still out.

The big problem in my eyes then is how do you know it's your interventions baking the difference, rather than just really good governance - very hard to tease apart.

Superficially, it sounds similar to the idea of charter cities. The idea does seem (at face value) to have some merit, but I suspect that the execution of the idea is where lots of problems occur.

So, practically aside, it seems like a massive amount of effort/investment/funding would allow a small country to progress rapidly toward less suffering and better life.

My general impression is that "we don't have a randomized control trial to prove the efficacy of this intervention" isn't the most common reason why people don't get helped. Maybe some combination of lack of resources, politics & entrenched interests, and trade-offs are the big ones? I don't know, but I'm sure some folks around here have research papers and textbooks about it.

Feels unlikely either that it would create an actually valid natural experiment (as you acknowledge, it's not a huge proportion of aid, and there are a lot of other factors that affect a country) or persuade people to do aid differently.

Particularly when EA's GHD programmes tend to be already focused on stuff which is well-evidenced at a granular level (malaria cures and vitamin supplementation) and targeted at specific countries with those problems (not all developing countries have malaria), by organizations that are not necessarily themselves EA, and a lot of non-EA funders are also trying to solve those problems in similar or identical ways.

Also feels like it would be a poor decision for, say, a Charity Entrepreneurship founder trying to solve a problem she identified as one she could make a major difference with based on her extensive knowledge of poverty in India deciding to try the programme in a potentially different Guinean context she doesn't have the same background understanding of simply because other EAs happened to have diverted funding to Guinea for signalling purposes.

ChatGPT deep-research users: What type of stuff does it perform well on? How good is it overall? 

Bit the bullet and paid them $200. So far, it's astonishingly good. If you're in the UK/EU, you can get a refund no questions asked within 14 days so if you're on the fence I'd definitely suggest giving it a go

Y-Combinator wants to fund Mechanistic Interpretability startups

"Understanding model behavior is very challenging, but we believe that in contexts where trust is paramount it is essential for an AI model to be interpretable. Its responses need to be explainable.

For society to reap the full benefits of AI, more work needs to be done on explainable AI. We are interested in funding people building new interpretable models or tools to explain the output of existing models."

Link
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs (Scroll to 12)

What they look for in startup founders
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/64-what-makes-great-founders-stand-out

What AI tools have made the biggest difference to your or your organisation's productivity?

1700 Joey Savoie (10)

This was from 2018. Does anyone have up-to-date estimates of the value per co-founder per charity?

I'm hiring a full-time remote administrator from an LMIC to take repetitive tasks off my core teams hands. Got any tips on how best to hire / manage them?

It's often easier to get responses from the most senior people in a field.

1. Most people are too intimidated to get in touch with them
2. They're senior for a reason - they tend to be way more productive and opportunity seeking
3. They have VAs, secretaries, and other people to bring serious requests to their attention.

I work in global mental health, and am looking for charities to refer clients to me. The two best-connected people in my field (according to GPT-4) are Dr Vikram Patel and Dr Shekhar Saxena. I sent out ~50 identical cold emails to people I thought could connect me to relevant charities / hospitals etc. Vikram and Saxena were the only two people to reply! 

I've also seen this argued by Tim Ferris and other highly productive people, but it resonated so poorly with my prior beliefs that I didn't update sufficiently. The implications here are huge - it could be way easier to gain access to influential people than the average EA perceives, and influence is power-law distributed! 

I've strongly had this experience. I have written 5 NYT bestsellers a cold email, and 3 replied. I get good rates with C-levels and I get the poorest rates at lower levels. 

But it strongly does depend on your story or organisation in my experience. Your org has a strong story so it warrants a reply. But I did a lot of marketing and some PR for dime in a dozen companies and if you lack a strong story, you can expect reply rates of senior people to be close to zero. 

Yes, though use this power wisely. I think it's good to imagine how much you'd pay to talk to said person and scale my effort as the number gets bigger. 

If I waste this person's time, they may become less willing to be open and hence I'll have damaged the commons. 

Will do now

[comment deleted]2
0
0
[comment deleted]2
0
0
[comment deleted]0
0
0
Curated and popular this week
Garrison
 ·  · 7m read
 · 
This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. Wow. The Wall Street Journal just reported that, "a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI." Technically, they can't actually do that, so I'm going to assume that Musk is trying to buy all of the nonprofit's assets, which include governing control over OpenAI's for-profit, as well as all the profits above the company's profit caps. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman already tweeted, "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." (Musk, for his part, replied with just the word: "Swindler.") Even if Altman were willing, it's not clear if this bid could even go through. It can probably best be understood as an attempt to throw a wrench in OpenAI's ongoing plan to restructure fully into a for-profit company. To complete the transition, OpenAI needs to compensate its nonprofit for the fair market value of what it is giving up. In October, The Information reported that OpenAI was planning to give the nonprofit at least 25 percent of the new company, at the time, worth $37.5 billion. But in late January, the Financial Times reported that the nonprofit might only receive around $30 billion, "but a final price is yet to be determined." That's still a lot of money, but many experts I've spoken with think it drastically undervalues what the nonprofit is giving up. Musk has sued to block OpenAI's conversion, arguing that he would be irreparably harmed if it went through. But while Musk's suit seems unlikely to succeed, his latest gambit might significantly drive up the price OpenAI has to pay. (My guess is that Altman will still ma
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
When we built a calculator to help meat-eaters offset the animal welfare impact of their diet through donations (like carbon offsets), we didn't expect it to become one of our most effective tools for engaging new donors. In this post we explain how it works, why it seems particularly promising for increasing support for farmed animal charities, and what you can do to support this work if you think it’s worthwhile. In the comments I’ll also share our answers to some frequently asked questions and concerns some people have when thinking about the idea of an ‘animal welfare offset’. Background FarmKind is a donation platform whose mission is to support the animal movement by raising funds from the general public for some of the most effective charities working to fix factory farming. When we built our platform, we directionally estimated how much a donation to each of our recommended charities helps animals, to show users.  This also made it possible for us to calculate how much someone would need to donate to do as much good for farmed animals as their diet harms them – like carbon offsetting, but for animal welfare. So we built it. What we didn’t expect was how much something we built as a side project would capture peoples’ imaginations!  What it is and what it isn’t What it is:  * An engaging tool for bringing to life the idea that there are still ways to help farmed animals even if you’re unable/unwilling to go vegetarian/vegan. * A way to help people get a rough sense of how much they might want to give to do an amount of good that’s commensurate with the harm to farmed animals caused by their diet What it isn’t:  * A perfectly accurate crystal ball to determine how much a given individual would need to donate to exactly offset their diet. See the caveats here to understand why you shouldn’t take this (or any other charity impact estimate) literally. All models are wrong but some are useful. * A flashy piece of software (yet!). It was built as
Omnizoid
 ·  · 9m read
 · 
Crossposted from my blog which many people are saying you should check out!    Imagine that you came across an injured deer on the road. She was in immense pain, perhaps having been mauled by a bear or seriously injured in some other way. Two things are obvious: 1. If you could greatly help her at small cost, you should do so. 2. Her suffering is bad. In such a case, it would be callous to say that the deer’s suffering doesn’t matter because it’s natural. Things can both be natural and bad—malaria certainly is. Crucially, I think in this case we’d see something deeply wrong with a person who thinks that it’s not their problem in any way, that helping the deer is of no value. Intuitively, we recognize that wild animals matter! But if we recognize that wild animals matter, then we have a problem. Because the amount of suffering in nature is absolutely staggering. Richard Dawkins put it well: > The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In fact, this is a considerable underestimate. Brian Tomasik a while ago estimated the number of wild animals in existence. While there are about 10^10 humans, wild animals are far more numerous. There are around 10 times that many birds, between 10 and 100 times as many mammals, and up to 10,000 times as many both of reptiles and amphibians. Beyond that lie the fish who are shockingly numerous! There are likely around a quadrillion fish—at least thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands o