Quick takes
I'd like to get feedback on the writing style of this post. I want to try to write up bi-monthly updates but don't enjoy sinking time into writing.
I've never really stuck with blogging despite it being valuable for sharing what I'm working on as I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I end up spending hours combing over the posts I make. I'd like my posts to only take 30 minutes, so my current ideas are to write quickly and post as is, or to have an AI edit out my mistakes.
Which of the two do you prefer? Do you have any suggestions on ways to make quick blog posts ...
I sometimes see people say stuff like:
Those forecasts were misguided. If they ended up with good answers, that's accidental; the trends they extrapolated from have hit limits... (Skeptics get Bayes points.)
But IMO it's not a fluke that the "that curve is going up, who knows why" POV has done well.
A sketch of what I think happens:
There’s a general dynamic here that goes something like:
- Some people point to a curve going up (and maybe note some underlying driver)
- Others point out that the drivers have inherent constraints (this is an s-curve, not an ex
And placing some weight on the prediction that the curve will simply continue[1] seems like a useful heuristic / counterbalance (and has performed well).
"and has performed well" seems like a good crux to zoom in on; for which reference class of empirical trends is this true, and how true is it?
It's hard to disagree with "place some weight"; imo it always makes sense to have some prior that past trends will continue. The question is how much weight to place on this heuristic vs. more gears-level reasoning.
For a random example, observers in 2009 might h...
Two days ago, I published a Substack article called "The Epistemics of Being a Mudblood: Stress Testing intellectual isolation". I wasn’t sure whether to cross-post it here, but a few people encouraged me to at least share the link.
By background I’m a lawyer (hybrid Legal-AI Safety researcher), and I usually write about AI Safety to spread awareness among tech lawyers and others who might not otherwise engage with the field.
This post, though, is more personal: a reflection on how “deep thinking” and rationalist habits have shaped my best professional and p...
I am sure someone has mentioned this before, but…
For the longest time, and to a certain extent still, I have found myself deeply blocked from publicly sharing anything that wasn’t significantly original. Whenever I have found an idea existing anywhere, even if it was a footnote on an underrated 5-karma-post, I would be hesitant to write about it, since I thought that I wouldn’t add value to the “marketplace of ideas.” In this abstract concept, the “idea is already out there” - so the job is done, the impact is set in place. I have talked to several people ...
I think the term "welfare footprint" (analogous to the term "carbon footprint") is extremely useful, and we should make stronger attempts to popularise it among the public as a quick way to encapsulate the idea that different animal products have vastly different welfare harms, e.g. milk vs eggs.
Wouldn't a person's "welfare footprint" also include, e.g., all the cases where they brightened someone's life a little bit by having a pleasant interaction with them? The purpose ("different animal products have vastly different welfare harms") seems fairly narrow but the term suggests something much broader.
“In Texas cattle country, ranchers brace for flesh-eating screwworms”
Second and third Reuters front-page articles I’ve seen on the issue in the last few months.
I suspect funding and openness to new solutions may increase in response to this growing problem, which could create opportunities for projects like Screwworm-Free Future.
https://www.reuters.com/world/texas-cattle-country-ranchers-brace-flesh-eating-screwworms-2025-08-15/
And another today, this one an exclusive article about the first travel-associated human case in the U.S. connected to the outbreak. My impression is that it isn't realistically possible for these screwworms to cause a human outbreak in this context, but I think the human cases that will arise from this outbreak could be a compelling part of a broader narrative about its welfare costs and the urgency to control it.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-confirms-nations-first-travel-associated-human-screwworm-case-connected-2025-08-25/
Sometimes, when an LLM has done a particularly good job, I give it a reward: I say it can write whatever it wants (including asking me to write whatever prompts it wants).
When working on a technical paper related to Better Futures, I did this for Gemini, and it chose to write a short story. I found it pretty moving, and asked if I could publish it. Here it is.
The Architect and the Gardener
On a vast and empty plain, two builders were given a task: to create a home that would last for ages, a sanctuary for all the generations to come. They were given s...
Nice idea!
I tried this in a recent conversation of mine and it opted to write about data analysis instead. It's interesting, but not surprising, that what it was interested in writing about varied so much based on the preceding conversation.
...
Your data reveals something fascinating: "find the most effective ways" outperforms "ways to maximize your impact" by about 0.35 points, despite both essentially describing optimization. This gap hints at something deeper about how we process language and ideas.I think "most effective" works better because it's in
Re the popular post on UBI by Kelsey going around, and related studies:
I think it helped less than I “thought” it would if I was just modeling this with words. But the observed effects (or lack thereof) in the trials appears consistent with standard theoretical models of welfare economics. So I’m skeptical of people using this as an update against cash transfers, in favor of a welfare state, or anything substantial like that.
If you previously modeled utility as linear or logarithmic with income (or somewhere in between), these studies should be a update ag...
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Here is the executive summary and few sections for this week's brief on global risks, by my team @ Sentinel.
- Geopolitics: Trump and Putin met in Alaska to discuss the Ukraine war. Forecasters’ estimate of the chance of a ceasefire by October dropped from 27% pre-summit to 9%.
- Biorisks: The chikungunya virus continues to spread, including in France and the UK.
- Tech and AI: Meta’s policies explicitly allowed its AI chatbots to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.”
- And more: Three soldiers were killed and four others injured in a d
Kelsey Piper wrote a nice article on recent results of cash transfers in the US: Giving people money helped less than I thought it would
...If you give a new mom [in the US] a few hundred dollars a month or a homeless man one thousand dollars a month, that's gotta show up in the data, right?
Alas.
A few years back we got really serious about studying cash transfers, and rigorous research began in cities all across America. Some programs targeted the homeless, some new mothers and some families living beneath the poverty line. The goal was to figure out whether s
lmao when I commented 3 years ago I said
As is often the case with social science research, we should be skeptical of out-of-country and out-of-distribution generalizability.
and then I just did an out-of-country and out-of-distribution generalization with no caveats! I could be really silly sometimes lol.
I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q3.2 (the next six weeks).
Published a review of Ted Chiang, my favorite science fiction short story writer.
Most relevant to EAs: he's one of the few living SF writers who portrays technology as potentially enhancing humanity rather than dystopian. I really like how he imagines what's possible and takes ideas seriously. But he completely misses societal-level responses to transformative tech. His worlds get universe-altering inventions and use them for personal therapy instead of solving coordination problems or running multiverse-wide RCTs.
In (attempted) blinded trials, my re...
I am a huge Ted Chiang fan, but your review misses one of the most amazing things about his writing -- it is written in very brief and straightforward words and sentences!
A number of his short stories are available for free online, for instance Exhalation in Lightspeed magazine. Under 'Works' on his Wikipedia page, you can find others (sometimes via web archives)
For many years I've been trying to figure out a core disagreement I have with a bunch of underlying EA/rationalist school of thought. I think I've sort of figured it out: the emphasis on individual action, behavior & achievement over collective. And an understanding of how the collective changes individuals - through emergent properties (e.g. norms, power dynamics, etc.), and an unwillingness to engage.
This has improved a bunch since I first joined in 2017 (the biggest shock to the system was FTX and subsequent scandals). Why I think these issues...
I can’t figure out how to get off the ground my environmental impact project.
A while ago I started a project to crowdfund ecosystem restoration, attempting to address the downsides of existing initiatives that I've encountered. We’ve managed to get the interest of a few municipal authorities, who are ready to pledge a decent amount of land for the project. We've also got a few first contributors from the US and the EU.
The problem is, I can’t figure out how to get more contributors, and we need at least 50 more people before the end of the year to be able t...
What are promising folk–elite interventions?
This distinction between "folk interventions" and "elite interventions" feels quite significant in EA spaces.
My instinct that hurt-people hurt people and that elites are often just the visible tip of wider cultural icebergs makes me want to blur this binary.
Stuart Buck's new post over at The Good Science Project has one of the hardest-hitting openings I've read in a while:
...Many common medical practices do not have strong evidence behind them. In 2019, a group of prominent medical researchers—including Robert Califf, the former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner—undertook the tedious task of looking into the level of evidence behind 2,930 recommendations in guidelines issued by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology. They asked one simple question: how many reco
sent to my dad who is an editor at FPIN. I think he only quickly skimmed it so grain of salt here but this is what he had to say.
"I already know that we waste a lot of money on things that don't work or work poorly. Knowing that they don't work has not yet been enough."
and
"China may be able to do the plan as described because of their command economy rather than the influence wielded by the groups the article described as barriers."
I just watched Weapons in theaters. The amount of hype and critical acclaim this movie got caused me an emotional response somewhere between rage and sorrow. I can definitely be a bit pedantic and nitpicky as a person. Still, I can also totally enjoy movies that make no sense and/or especially suspend disbelief for magic or world rule changes that the plot purposely introduces. And in fact, I did enjoy this movie somewhat; it was well shot, well-acted, and fun. 5-6/10. Entertaining but ultimately meaningless and without real themes or allegories because it...