Quick takes
Mental health is one of the most widespread, impactable, yet neglected global health issues of our time. Even knowing mental health conditions are generally under-reported and/ or misrepresented, evidence still shows widespread effects of mental wellbeing on physical health, life satisfaction, and productivity, however it has still not taken off as a major cause area in many EA organizations I have talked to. Why is this?
Thanks @MichaelPlant ! I actually recently connected with Joel from your team and am very interested in leveraging some of your work to influence priorities in my current role. I’m eager to continue talking about mental health and wellbeing in the EA space and hoping to get more involved with HLI or the work you are doing on a volunteer basis!
[central europe] We are organising the largest AI-safety march (at least in central europe) to date at Prague, starting at 15:00 on 31st August. We have got parlimentary support as well as very supportive police, allowing us to take the preffered route. We want as many people to come - fell free to spread information about the event outside EA as much as possible, especially if you have friends living near Prague who may come. If you want closer info/visual materials or help us with organisation, you can get in contact with czech PauseAI on whatsapp.
Luma e...
After the initial experiment period, we've decided to keep the featured page.
One of the key graphs in making this decision is below:
Now that the featured page is likely to stick around long term, I'd like to start collecting ideas for V2[1]. Do you use the page? Do you pointedly not use the page? I'd love to get any and all feedback, in the comments here, or via this form.
Please share small things like aesthetic tweaks as well as larger issues such as a disagreement on the kind of posts that get featured, or how featuring is done. Happy to answer questio...
Thanks Abraham, that's good to know! FWIW the new & upvoted page is just the Forum frontpage as it was before, so if you just ignore the featured page, your forum experience shouldn't change at all.
Also we did feature that post - so if you check the featured page you'd have been more likely to see it overall than previously (when something niche but impactful like that was likely to get low karma and sink off the frontpage pretty quick).
I wrote this in a post, but it might be a better quick take: Would you describe charities within GCR as "super-effective?" They may or may not be good long-term bets, but clearly the outcomes are very uncertain & hard to trace. Whereas GHD + Animal Welfare are probably much more trackable.
I'm asking because I saw on GivingMultiplier.org that they were marketing GCR charities as "highly effective," and that gave me pause.
What if exact copies don't matter but future experiences still do?
I think an ethics resulting from the following two premises is worth exploring:
P1: The total moral value of subjectively indistinguishable observer-moments doesn't scale with the number of copies, i.e. they sum to a constant value.
- This is because subjectively indistinguishable observer-moments, in some sense, happen to the same "someone". One could think of themselves as all their copies. N observer-moments that are subjectively indistinguishable aren't felt N times by that same "someone". O
You should judge others on a curve, and probably yourself as well.
Judging others on a curve means that folks see reward for doing more than what is typical. This is just good reinforcement-learning theory, since it is easy to get both feedback on rewarded & not-rewarded actions.
I started writing this thinking that you should NOT judge yourself on a curve, in contrast. IE, you know much more about your own circumstances, and so pretending you are average throws away info. For example, if I only gave 5% of my income to charity, that would be above averag...
Into Financial Independence and EA? Check out the Generosity, Legacy, & FI forum on the ChooseFI Forum.
I’m continuing to explore this theory of change: if we can give people financial literacy tools to build confidence and financial security, we can help create the conditions for more people to give back, and give more effectively.
A big part of that is creating a space where people who care about personal finance and doing good can find each other. If you’re interested in both FI and effective giving, I’m hoping this can become a place for you to conne...
As someone who hires people (I am hiring right now, see bottom of the post), I often get emails asking whether someone should apply for a role I've listed.
If you're considering contacting a hiring manager to ask if you're a good fit for the role, you should just apply.
Why?
- Job descriptions are wish lists.
Everyone wants someone who checks all the boxes. If the dream candidate applies, you'll probably get rejected. In reality, everyone has weaknesses, and an 80% match candidate is highly competitive. - Self-skepticism correlates with candidate quality.
Applicant
EA groups have been and continue to be overpowered.
Running an EA group is among the most impactful things you can do when you are at University.
The other day my previous co-organizer sent me a list of 15 (!) people who were in our EA group who are doing exciting and important GCR work.
In the interest of getting this quick take out, I am not reaching out to everyone to see if I can list their name/quote them but I want to stress the “exciting and important” aspect of this. Some of these people are perhaps within the top 10 people affecting American AI poli...
Has anyone at CEA ever looked systematically at the near-misses: the people who came to one or two meetings and never came back? The success stories are striking, but without some comparison group it's hard to tell how much is the group's doing and how much is that ambitious people at those universities end up in those roles regardless. Even an informal follow-up on the handful of drop-out names you can still remember would say something.
Not that I need this to be convinced, the anecdote here is striking enough, I'm mostly just curious.
Most AI-geopolitics analysis concentrates on frontier production. I've been exploring a complementary question: what happens to the capabilities the frontier leaves behind?
Downloadable models can persist after commercial support and meaningful developer control disappear. As inference and adaptation costs decline, some of these systems may become accessible to actors that could not have exploited them at release.
The longer piece develops this through the ideas of capability sedimentation, temporal capability arbitrage and “compute-poor but model-rich” stat...
How much does music, literature and art influence people's perception of reality?
Where is it on the scale from "All our opinions come from external sources." via "The messages in art are irrelevant, people enjoy things without it changing their worldview." to "People consume only art that matches their worldview."?
Is the "tech-right" getting more traction because it embraces AI art which is quick to generate and can be captivating?
Example (not sure if this person is "tech-right"): A song about Elon Musk with genuinely catchy music: https://youtu.be/wWZYP5jn5w4
Some very half-baked brainstormed ideas for increasing the likelihood of getting to something like Plan A or S:
- General public targeted messaging needs to directly funnel people towards taking action that actually increases likelihood of policy change. Right now it seems like a lot of it is just trying to get people to take AI x-risk seriously in the first place. This is good and should continue but it should also direct people to email or call their representatives or lobby them in person if they're able, and to ask them to support specific bills (PauseAI'
Here is a claim I made to my friend yesterday that I think is true and believe people continually underrate: given reasonable assumptions about the influx of incoming capital, getting into (ie working in/thinking about) AI/ AI Safety early has probably been better for GHD or AW than lots (maybe all, tho I haven’t crunched the numbers) of direct work in GHD and AW.
I think this could even be true for EA CB (with much less confidence). AIS groups grow a lot faster than EA groups historically do and while the groups are often not that EA aligned, the leaders ...
I used Claude to build a booking web app for the EA Netherlands coworking office and open-sourced it (MIT), in case you run a similar space: https://github.com/ea-netherlands/ean-office
It's removed lots of small, fiddly jobs on our side, and our users seem to love it!
It does desk booking (full or half days), QR check-in at the door, a trial day for first-time visitors that an admin approves, automatic reminders and a no-show escalation ladder, member-proposed evening events and whole-office co-working days — and it produces the occupancy and attendance fig...
It looks like https://www.youtube.com/@EffectiveAltruismOfficial (which used to be https://www.youtube.com/c/EffectiveAltruismVideos ) unlisted almost all of their videos, including e.g. Ajeya Cotra's classic introduction to EA
Does anyone know who to reach out to to ask if this was intentional?
No, they will still be available but only viewable via direct links. Additionally, any vidoes that that have been unlisted but embedded elsewhere (a personal website, for instance) are still viewable. Also, we will be creating a new YouTube channel exclusively for EAG/EAGx videos. The idea is to have main EA channel for higher-production and more curated videos. Just in a transition period right now. Unlisting helps us keep the main YouTube channel less cluttered w/o completely barring viewing access to old videos while we're in the transition period.
Applications to SPAR Fall 2026 are closing tomorrow Aug 18 EOD Anywhere on Earth. SPAR is the ecosystem's biggest AI safety research program, and it's part-time remote.
We still have many strong projects across AI safety, AI policy, and biosecurity with very few applications[1], so please consider applying! This round, we also have 18 non-research/generalist projects that people can apply to, and we have much more mentee capacity than previous rounds; we expect to accept around 500 people into the program.
If you have friends who have thought about going int...
Since we've got so many good entries to the Cluelessness Critiques Competition, I'm currently planning not to feature any of them (even those that would otherwise qualify). This'll mean that you can escape the cluelessness conversation by toggling to the featured page.
Alternatively, on the 'new and upvoted' page, you can customise your feed to hide the Cluelessness Critiques Week tag.
One reason we don't see large doom futures or doom insurance markets (including in catastrophe bonds) is that a large proportion of the risk is uninsurable, due to uncertainty on enforcability. Collateralised instruments underprice p(doom), and prices cannot adjust to the values that collaterisation participants would accept.
All these contracts and securities are reliant on courts to enforce them, alongside arbitration mechanisms (e.g. in the event of defaults or payment disputes). However in a doom state, these courts don't exist. Therefore these contract...