Ops culture isn’t yet a building culture - the default mindset is “keep the trains running” rather than “ship something”.

real

Should forecasting receive more or less EA funding?

It's not a good use of marginal funding when even one of the best forecasters can't build a strong view around its impact. 

You can say "confidential AI use cases make it valuable". I don't disagree. I disagree that $100M went into this. Why shouldn't it be $10M?

I'm glad as a movement we are able to appreciate this nuance too David. By no means does Anthropic get a free pass, especially since mass foreign surveillance wasnt part of their two non-negociables, as someone who is foreign to the US.

Still want to acknowledge the bold action they took in the face of an autocratic regime

I've never been more proud to be part of the Effective Altruism movement

Knew it was a bit too good to be true 🥲 Meltblown PP rolls and facepiece moulds seem like the key upstream bottlenecks to N95 / reusable respirator production.

More reason to advocate for pre-securing offshore oil rig-style labour contracts + government compliance (NIOSH) for surging PPE production.

Intuitively, advocating for private companies to maximise production and removing the friction to do so feels more tractable than advocating federal governments to stockpile +5 billion additional N95s. Ideally we should still pursue both

500M in N95 mask materials in 28 days from just 2 plants is a really massive number, that's 17M per day!

Quick BOTEC: 50M essential workers in the US demand 10M N95 masks per day, assuming the best N95 masks on the market today have a 5-day lifecycle. Even if they demanded 50M day, if we increased the number of plants from 2 to 10 (assuming the next 8 have 50% the max capacity of the Braskem plants), this might potentially solve the meltblown bottleneck.

Updates me toward thinking meltblown polypropylene may be more capable of surge than I previously assumed.

If similar labour pre-commitments and coordination mechanisms could be secured across other PPE stages before the next pandemic, this could potentially shift the surge vs stockpile ratio more towards surge.

Welcome to the UK Gergo! 😊

As someone not in a full-time impact job, I find thinking about Movement Roles is doubly important! By de-coupling from the job market, this is a powerful framing to be more agentic. Strong upvoted this post

Deeply appreciate this Kristof. Interesting that at a broad level (what are the best charities, how to help more people), it cites credible and evidence-based resources.

Then when discussing animals and Africa - i.e. more long-tail keywords - it does not. 

There is probably low-hanging opportunity here for charities to write up more indexable FAQs and blogposts that match the language a user would use when asking an LLM a question (or even Google). 

Helpful indeed, and thanks for the spreadsheet!