Quick takes
It is popular to hate on Swapcard, and yet Swapcard seems like the best available solution despite its flaws. Claude Code or other AI coding assistants are very good nowadays, and conceivably, someone could just Claude Code a better Swapcard that maintained feature parity while not having flaws.
Overall I'm guessing this would be too hard right now, but we do live in an age of mysteries and wonders. It gets easier every month. One reason for optimism is it seems like the Swapcard team is probably not focused on the somewhat odd use case of EAGs in general (...
Yes,
I could use help understanding the demand for
- Similar features but less bugs
- Focusing on CEA's use case (making more high quality connections, right?)
Can you help me with this @Eli Rose🔸 ?
Is the recent partial lifting of US chip export controls on China (see e.g. here: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/selling-h200s-to-china-is-unwise) good or bad for humanity? I’ve seen many takes from people whose judgment I respect arguing that it is very bad, but their arguments, imho, just don’t make sense. What am I missing?
For transparency, I am neither Chinese nor American, nor am I a paid agent of them. I am not at all confident in this take, but imho someone should make it.
I see two possible scenarios: A) you are not sure how close humanity is to deve...
Recent generations of Claude seem better at understanding blog posts and making fairly subtle judgment calls than most smart humans. These days when I’d read an article that presumably sounds reasonable to most people but has what seems to me to be a glaring conceptual mistake, I can put it in Claude, ask it to identify the mistake, and more likely than not Claude would land on the same mistake as the one I identified.
I think before Opus 4 this was essentially impossible, Claude 3.xs can sometimes identify small errors but it’s a crapshoot on whether it ca...
The significance, as I read it, is that you can now trust Claude roughly like a reasonable colleague for spotting such mistakes, both in your own drafts and in texts you rely on at work or in life.
I wouldn't go quite this far, at least from my comment. There's a saying in startups, "never outsource your core competency", and unfortunately reading blog posts and spotting conceptual errors of a certain form is a core competency of mine. Nonetheless I'd encourage other Forum users less good at spotting errors (which is most people) to try to do something like...
I like Scott's Mistake Theory vs Conflict Theory framing, but I don't think this is a complete model of disagreements about policy, nor do I think the complete models of disagreement will look like more advanced versions of Mistake Theory + Conflict Theory.
To recap, here's my short summaries of the two theories:
Mistake Theory: I disagree with you because one or both of us are wrong about what we want, or how to achieve what we want)
Conflict Theory: I disagree with you because ultimately I want different things from you. The Marxists, who Scott was or...
The dynamics you discuss here follow pretty intuitively from the basic conflict/mistake paradigm.
I think it's very easy to believe that the natural extension of the conflicts/mistakes paradigm is that policy fights are composed of a linear combination of the two. Schelling's "rudimentary/obvious" idea, for example, that conflict is and cooperation is often structurally inseparable, is a more subtle and powerful reorientation than it first seems.
But this is a hard point to discuss (because it's in the structure of an "unknown known"), and I didn't interview...
A bit sad to find out that Open Philanthropy’s (now Coefficient Giving) GCR Cause Prioritization team is no more.
I heard it was removed/restructured mid-2025. Seems like most of the people were distributed to other parts of the org. I don't think there were public announcements of this, though it is quite possible I missed something.
I imagine there must have been a bunch of other major changes around Coefficient that aren't yet well understood externally. This caught me a bit off guard.
There don't seem to be many active online artifa...
As a university organizer at a very STEM focused state school, I suspect that students getting liberal arts degrees are more easily convinced to pursue a career in direct work. If this is the case, it could be because direct work compares more favorably with the other career options of those with liberal arts degrees, or because the clearer career outcomes of STEM majors create more path dependence and friction when they consider switching careers. This is potentially another thing to keep in mind when trying to compare the successes of EA uni groups.
U.S. Politics should be a main focus of US EAs right now. In the past year alone, every major EA cause area has been greatly hurt or bottlenecked by Trump. $40 billion in global health and international development funds was lost when USAID shut down, which some researchers project could lead to 14 million more deaths by 2030. Trump has signed an Executive Order that aims to block states from creating their own AI regulations, and has allowed our most powerful chips to be exported to China. Trump has withdrawn funding from, and U.S. support for, internatio...
If we’re doing a constitutional convention then really make it count…
-Statehood for Puerto Rico & Washington D.C.
-Expand the house so each representative represents fewer people.
https://youtu.be/KhQGHY44XPM?si=iLivhjAUAl-igEtd
-Make some extra Senators elected by popular vote.
-Make it easier to remove the president/executive with a congressional vote of no confidence or a 60% referendum vote at each mid-terms.
-Add term limits to the supreme court & elect new justices on a schedule. Or make the Supreme Court a rotating lottery of Appellate judges.
Benjamin Lay — "Quaker Comet", early (radical) abolitionist, general "moral weirdo" — died on this day 267 years ago.
I shared a post about him a little while back, and still think of February 8 as "Benjamin Lay Day".
...
Around the same time I also made two paintings inspired by his life/work, which I figured I'd share now. One is an icon-style-inspired image based on a portrait of him[1]:
The second is based on a print depicting the floor plan of an infamous slave ship (Brooks). The print was used by abolitionists (mainly(?) the Society for Effec...
The AI Eval Singularity is Near
- AI capabilities seem to be doubling every 4-7 months
- Humanity's ability to measure capabilities is growing much more slowly
- This implies an "eval singularity": a point at which capabilities grow faster than our ability to measure them
- It seems like the singularity is ~here in cybersecurity, CBRN, and AI R&D (supporting quotes below)
- It's possible that this is temporary, but the people involved seem pretty worried
Appendix - quotes on eval saturation
- "For AI R&D capabilities, we found that Claude Opus 4.6 h
I've just noticed that the OBBB Act contains a "no tax on overtime" provision, exempting extra overtime pay up to a deduction of $12,500, for tax years 2025-2028. If you, like me, are indifferent between 40-hour workweeks and alternating 32- and 48-hour workweeks, you can get a pretty good extra tax deduction. This can be as easy as working one weekend day every 2 weeks and taking a 3-day weekend the following week. (That's an upper bound on the difficulty! Depending on your schedule and preferences there are probably even easier ways.) Unfortunately this only works for hourly, not salaried, employees.
It seems like a worthwhile project to ask/pressure Anthropic's founders to make their pledges legally binding.
Anthropic's founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Ozzie Gooen estimates that in a few years this could be worth >$40 billion.
As Ozzie writes, adherence to the Giving Pledge (the Gates one) is pretty low: only 36% of deceased original pledgers met the 50% commitment. It's hard to follow through on such commitments, even for (originally) highly morally motivated people.
It would probably be worthwhile to encourage legally binding versions of the Giving Pledge in general.
Donations before death are optimal, but it's particularly easy to ensure that the pledge is met at that stage with a will which can be updated at the time of signing it. (I presume most of the 64% did have a will, but chose to leave their fortune to others. I guess it's possible some fortunes inherited by widow[er]s will be donated to pledged causes in the fullness of time).
I don't think this should replace the Giving Pledge; some people's inte...
Should GiveWell offer Animal Welfare regrants on an opt-in basis?
The GiveWell FAQ (quoted below) suggests that GiveWell focuses exclusively on human-directed interventions primarily for reasons of specialization—i.e., avoiding duplication of work already done by Coefficient Giving and others—rather than due to a principled objection to recommending animal-focused charities. If GiveWell is willing to recommend these organizations when asked, why not reduce the friction a bit?
A major part of GiveWell’s appeal has been its role as an “index fund for charities...
TBH my sense is that GiveWell is just being polite.
A perhaps more realistic motivation is that admitting animal suffering into GiveWell's models would implicitly force them to specify moral weights for animals (versus humans), and there is no way to do that without inviting huge controversy leaving at least some groups very upset. Much easier to say "sorry, not our wheelhouse" and effectively set animal weights to zero.
FWIW I agree with this decision (of GiveWell's).
Potential Animal Welfare intervention: encourage the ASPCA and others to scale up their FAW budget
I’ve only recently come to appreciate how large the budgets are for the ASPCA, Humane World (formerly HSUS), and similar large, broad-based animal charities. At a quick (LLM) scan of their public filings, they appear to have a combined annual budget of ~$1Bn, most of which is focused on companion animals.
Interestingly, both the ASPCA and Humane World explicitly mention factory farming as one of their areas of concern. Yet, based on available data, it looks lik...
Mental health support for those working on AI risks and policy?
During the numerous projects I work on relating to AI risks, policies, and future threats/scenarios, I speak to a lot of people who bring exposed to issues of catastrophic and existential nature for the first time (or grappling with them for the first time in detail). This combined with the likelihood that things will get worse before they better, makes me frequently wonder: are we doing enough around mental health support?
Things that I don’t know exist but feel they should. Some may sound OTT ...
What are people's favorite arguments/articles/essays trying to lay out the simplest possible case for AI risk/danger?
Every single argument for AI danger/risk/safety I’ve seen seems to overcomplicate things. Either they have too many extraneous details, or they appeal to overly complex analogies, or they seem to spend much of their time responding to insider debates.
I might want to try my hand at writing the simplest possible argument that is still rigorous and clear, without being trapped by common pitfalls. To do that, I want to quickly survey the field so I can learn from the best existing work as well as avoid the mistakes they make.
I've been experimenting recently with a longtermist wiki, written fully with LLMs.
Some key decisions/properties:
1. Fully LLM-generated, heavily relying on Claude Code.
2. Somewhat opinionated. Tries to represent something of a median longtermist/EA longview, with a focus on the implications of AI. All pages are rated for "importance".
3. Claude will estimates a lot of percentages and letter grades for things. If you see a percentage or grade, and there's no citation, it might well be a guess by Claude.
4. An emphasis on numeric estimates, models, and diagrams...
The next PauseAI UK protest will be (AFAIK) the first coalition protest between different AI activist groups, the main other group being Pull the Plug, a new organisation focused primarily on current AI harms. It will almost certainly be the largest protest focused exclusively on AI to date.
In my experience, the vast majority of people in AI safety are in favor of big-tent coalition protests on AI in theory. But when faced with the reality of working with other groups who don't emphasize existential risk, they have misgivings. So I'm curious what people he...
Consider adopting the term o-risk.
William MacAskill has recently been writing a bunch about how if you’re a Long-Termist, it’s not enough merely to avoid the catastrophic outcomes. Even if we get a decent long-term future, it may still fall far short of the best future we could have achieved. This outcome — of a merely okay future, when we could have had a great future — would still be quite tragic.
Which got me thinking: EAs already have terms like x-risk (for existential risks, or things which could cause human extinction) and s-risk (for suffering risks,...
might want to check out this (only indirectly related but maybe useful).
Personally don't mind o-risk think it has some utility but s-risk ~somewhat seems like it still works here. An O-risk is just a smaller scale s-risk no?
Thanks to everyone who voted for our next debate week topic! Final votes were locked in at 9am this morning.
We can’t announce a winner immediately, because the highest karma topic (and perhaps some of the others) touches on issues related to our politics on the EA Forum policy. Once we’ve clarified which topics we would be able to run, we’ll be able to announce a winner.
Once we have, I’ll work on honing the exact wording. I’ll write a post with a few options, so that you can have input into the exact version we end up discussing.
PS: ...
Nice one @Toby Tremlett🔹 . If the forum dictators decide that the democratically selected topic of democratic backsliding is not allowed, I will genuinely be OK with that decision ;).
Consultancy Opportunities – Biological Threat Reduction 📢📢📢
The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) is looking for two consultants to support the implementation of the Fortifying Institutional Resilience Against Biological Threats (FIRABioT) Project in Africa. Supported by Global Affairs Canada's Weapons Threat Reduction Program, this high-impact initiative aims to support WOAH Members in strengthening capacities to prevent, detect, prepare, respond and recover from biological threats. The project also supports the implementation of th...