AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse.
Short version: if you want a share of the coming Anthropic and OpenAI windfall - the $37bn+ that could be in play next year - the way in is to become 'legibly excellent', so the evaluators and donors that frontier lab staff already trust point them to yo...
Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m writing this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement by CEA.
Agency - the realisation that you really can just do things.
TL;DR
Biosecurity needs people (of any background) who are agentic and have a high execution velocity and track record....
We shouldn't actually do this because mastodon is not good software and will probably be obsolete soon, but if that were not the case.
It would be a strategic win for EA to conspicuously fund the development of a community notes feature for Mastodon.
Here's what I think would happen: most mastodon communities would shit on it and refuse to use it because it had EA funding, but not vehemently enough to remove the feature from their forks, so this would just result in them looking incredibly wrong and bad and guilty every time anyone saw a successful community note.
And also: Community notes is the kind of feature that we should expect to actually substantially improve public policy discourse so it's the kind of thing we should be funding in earnest.
But I'm not sure we should work in that area. It's unfortunate that a global forum probably can't rise to prominence if it's received partisan funding, even if it's bi-partisan, as Argumentum ad Aurum is live and well and cavorting all around.