It can't help it too. Here's the CoT from a microsite I asked Claude to build recently:

The frontend-design skill is warning me away from exactly the palette I was about to use—cream background, serif display, terracotta accent—which it flags as a common AI default. I need to reject that instinct and make a real aesthetic choice that's specific to this project, not a templated solution. ...

Yet the resulting aesthetics were still unmistakably Claudey. Aesthetics taste seems quite the bulwark. 

Yet another banger of a report! Awesome stuff.

I asked Claude to create an interactive dashboard version and to "make it similarly aesthetically pleasing":

Pledge values:

Sensitivities:

Build your own multiplier:

You should definitely trust the actual report over this dashboard, if you see something funny blame Claude... 

When I scroll over comment notifications, the hover popup used to show the comments, now it shows the posts.

Very much appreciate the spot-check, thanks!

Abi Olvera's Golden rice delay dashboard, includes BOTEC calculations and sources, supplement to her Substack article A blocked GMO rice could have saved 100,000 children. The same tech makes pineapples pink:

Every year, vitamin A deficiency blinds 250,000 to 500,000 children. Half of them die within a year of losing their sight.

One third of children worldwide are deficient, roughly half of children in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia¹. Deficiency weakens the immune system, so children are more likely to die from common infections like diarrhea or measles.

Rich countries solved this kind of problem by adding nutrients to staple foods. The United States adds iodine to most salt, and folic acid to flour to prevent birth defects.

Rice is a critical staple among the world’s poor, so scientists improved rice. They added beta-carotene, the thing that makes carrots orange and that the body turns into vitamin A. The new rice cooks and tastes the same, but it’s yellow. They called it Golden Rice and licensed it for free to any farmer earning under $10,000 a year.

It has been ready since the mid-2000s. Today it grows nowhere.

The reason is that it is a GMO. Environmental groups, led by Greenpeace, fought it in country after country for two decades.

As far as I can tell, no one has calculated the cost of that delay. I’ve spent the last few weeks doing so. My rough estimate is that the delay has killed about 106,000 children and left another 210,000 to 425,000 blind.² Measured in healthy years of life lost, that is somewhere between 7 and 12 million.³ (My full calculations are here. I will update these figures as I receive feedback.)

That works out to roughly fourteen children dying every single day, for twenty years, from a nutrient we already know how to add to food. ...

Most GMO crops are changed in how they grow, so the part you eat is ordinary. In Golden Rice, the part you eat is the part that changed. That made it feel new.

Greenpeace framed it as dangerous, saying corporations were secretly behind it. They falsely claimed it was unproven and that it was unclear whether children could absorb the vitamin. Activists tore up test fields and filed lawsuits to block approval. Over a hundred Nobel laureates signed a letter asking Greenpeace to stop.

While Golden Rice sat blocked, other new GMO foods reached store shelves. One of them is a pink pineapple. It sells for about $10 in stores and up to $50 online. It uses the same chemistry as Golden Rice, run in the opposite direction. Golden Rice turns on the pathway that makes the vitamin children need. The pineapple turns it off, so the fruit stays a pretty pink.

The lifesaving technology is in the Western world, growing a nicer pineapple for parties.

In 2021 Ajeya described the practical institutional reasoning behind worldview diversification on the 80K podcast like so, in case useful:

Ajeya Cotra: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that there’s necessarily something to be said for it on a rigorously philosophical point of view, but I think there’s something to be said for not going all in on what you believe a rigorously philosophical accounting would say to value. So, I think one way you could put it is that Open Phil is — as an institution — trying to place a big bet on this idea of doing utilitarian-ish, thoughtful, deep intellectual philanthropy, which has never been done before, and we want to give that bet its best chance. And we don’t necessarily want to tie that bet — like Open Phil’s value as an institution to the world — to a really hyper-specific notion of what that means.

Ajeya Cotra: So, you can think about the longtermist team as trying to be the best utilitarian philosophers they can be, and trying to philosophy their way into the best goals, and win that way. Where at least moderately good execution on these goals that were identified as good (with a lot of philosophical work) is the bet they’re making, the way they’re trying to win and make their mark on the world. And then the near-termist team is trying to be the best utilitarian economists they can be, trying to be rigorous, and empirical, and quantitative, and smart. And trying to moneyball regular philanthropy, sort of. And they see their competitive advantage as being the economist-y thinking as opposed to the philosopher-y thinking.

Ajeya Cotra: And so when the philosopher takes you to a very weird unintuitive place — and, furthermore, wants you to give up all of the other goals that on other ways of thinking about the world that aren’t philosophical seem like they’re worth pursuing — they’re just like, stop… I sometimes think of it as a train going to crazy town, and the near-termist side is like, I’m going to get off the train before we get to the point where all we’re focusing on is existential risk because of the astronomical waste argument. And then the longtermist side stays on the train, and there may be further stops.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, interesting. I like the idea that rather than thinking about this as exclusively a philosophical disagreement, think about it as a disagreement on the strategy question of, what’s our edge? What’s our edge over everyone else who’s trying to do good? And one of them is, “Well, we’ll be better at philosophy, and we’ll reach more philosophically rigorous conclusions”. And the other people are like, “We’ll be better in some other way. We’ll be more empirical, or be more careful about thinking about…”

Ajeya Cotra: More quantitative, yeah.

Robert Wiblin: More quantitative, exactly.

Ajeya Cotra: I mean, I actually think the near-termist side of the organisation empirically uses quantitative estimates way, way more than the longtermist side of the organisation does. So, on the longtermist side, we’ve talked ourselves into highly prioritising causes where there are only like 10 people working on them. And so most of our effort is trying to convince potential grantees — potential people who could be helpful in this mission — that it’s reasonable to work on at all. And trying to fund people who are trying to do the basic thing that we want to do — for example, reducing global catastrophic biorisks as opposed to focusing on biorisks in general. And that is where almost all of our selection pressure has to go. But on the near-termist side of things, they’re looking at lists of hundreds of things they could focus on, like air pollution in India, or migration from low-income countries to middle-income countries. And they have a huge list of causes and they’re just doing the math on the number of lives that get better per dollar with each of these options.

Ajeya Cotra: So, the feel of doing near-termist work at Open Phil is definitely much more quantitative and rigorous, and in some sense it feels more like what you would have thought a cartoon EA foundation would feel like, because they have more opportunity to map things out.

I'd be interested to know how much this has changed since if at all, especially on the longtermist side.

Very much appreciate the pointers and candour (and sorry for mistakenly calling you a DRI), much for me to chew on. In any case I was hoping you'd answer this on the podcast! But I suppose it just wasn't a good podcast question. 

Here's how Holden Karnofsky describes the DRI idea just for your interest, I don't have any other substantive thoughts on it, just "shouldn't there be more DRIs in GHD?" (there's more, I just picked the parts that struck me most):

"DRI" is a Silicon Valley acronym - "directly responsible individual" - referring to the idea that if you want something done well, you should designate a DRI for it. This person isn't necessarily the person who is "in charge of it" from a power perspective (though Daniela and I think it usually should be, and in fact often dislike the term "DRI" in corporate contexts for this reason - we think DRIs should be owners/managers), but it's the person who is "directly responsible" in the sense that the thing going well or poorly is on them. I chose this term even though I often dislike its use, just as an evocative shorthand.

The DRI-centric worldview in a nutshell is:

• Serious impact in domain or task X is nearly always the product of a person who is obsessed with X and has spent a lot of time on X (relative to other people, and ~always over ~1000h even for very green-field X).
  • The rough mechanism is that any impact on the world requires understanding and dealing with a large # of little things. You need someone who is sharp and adaptive, but most importantly puts in the time and focus to deal with all of these things.
• So if you are trying to have impact on X, you'd best either become that person or recruit/develop/manage them; other things are unlikely to work. If you're noticing that X isn't going as well as you hoped, your first and possibly last question should be whether the right person (or people) is working on it.
• The game of figuring out who is a fit for what is a contender for "best thing to be good at." This is a great thing to think about and build knowledge of.

... 

• The DRI-centric worldview advocates for a bit of an obsessive, often beyond-what-seems-reasonable dedication to the idea that everything that matters should have an unambiguous point person, usually someone who has a heavy concentration of both power and responsibility w/r/t whatever X they are working on. (This person is then held directly accountable for how things go.)
  • Interacting with tech founder types, I've often found it almost surreal the way they automatically go "Well X is in charge of Y and I'm not going to second guess them - we are going to do what they want." It's hard to say why it feels so surreal without actual examples, but like ... a lot of times it seems really obvious that the person is crazy and doing a certain kind of thing wrong ... and yet over time I feel like their attitude gets vindicated.
• The DRI-centric worldview is really obsessed with commitment. Anytime someone seems like a sure thing to obsess over X for the next 10y of their life, the DRI-centric worldview is tempted to bet on them to succeed. Anytime someone seems like they've got one foot out, the DRI-centric worldview is like "This is going to suck." (An exception would be when a person is on the way out of something they've already mastered - like a CEO leaving a company - and is helping transition.) I think the DRI-centric worldview is less surprised than other worldviews by how little mark various brilliant, competent, scattered people have made on the world.
• The DRI-centric worldview really doesn't like the idea of trying to "have an idea" that one hands off to another person to execute. It likes the hybrid visionary/executor. 

In general, I feel (in a way that I couldn't substantiate well without more work) that I've had a lot of surprises in my life that have updated me toward the above points. There are lots of times when other worldviews, and basic internal logic, is excited about some project because the idea seems so good. But when the key ingredients outlined above are lacking, it generally ends up bad.

Nan Ransohoff's There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems is on my mind too:

There’s a surprisingly big category of problems that are ‘orphaned.’ By ‘orphaned’ I mean: you can’t point to a specific person or organization who thinks it’s their responsibility to deliver the outcome in its entirety. Lots of people talk about the problem, and often many work on slices of it. But if you asked: ‘is there a hyper-competent person waking up every day feeling accountable for making sure this gets solved?’—the answer is very often, ‘no.’

These problems exist across domains and at a variety of ‘altitudes.’ Indeed, some are perhaps better described as ‘things we want to be true’ rather than ‘problems.’ In any event, a few examples that have been on my mind recently:

1. Can we prevent infection from all respiratory pathogens (including the common cold)?
2. Can we make every new building in SF both serve its function and be beautiful?
3. Can we permanently fix the American west’s water problem?
4. Can we halve X risk?
5. Can we eliminate single-use plastic globally without making convenience trade-offs?
6. Can we make childcare costs so low that they’re a non-factor in deciding whether to have kids?

In my opinion, there should be ‘general managers’—GMs—for problems like these. These are founder-types who feel personally responsible for delivering a specific outcome (vs field-building generally); hyper-competent leaders who will pull whatever levers necessary to achieve the defined outcome. Most companies wouldn’t let an important initiative go unmanned or without a ‘directly responsible individual’ — why are we OK not having GMs for even more wide-reaching problems?

Nan gives the historical examples of D.A. Henderson "owning smallpox eradication" and Evan Wolfson "owning marriage equality". I honestly forgot about this article yesterday, but your remark at the end there reminded me of it.

I was hoping you would have good examples for me to learn from! I don't know of any GHD ones.

I think of you as a DRI who "owns the problem of people not having access to high-quality healthcare". You did say you selected ODH's intervention based on your thesis, but actually executing is another matter entirely and you've been hitting it out of the park, and I also get the sense that if the v1 approach didn't work out you would've done the sense-making -> reorienting -> trying differently thing and still ended up "finding product-beneficiary fit" instead of just abandoning ODH (correct me if I'm wrong). 

A hypothetical example: suppose you were considering seed-funding a policy advocacy org to encourage governments to institute national action plans that include cost-effective interventions to mitigate violence against women and girls. This is pretty systemic change-y, and I wouldn't be at all certain that the specific intervention idea (advocacy for NAPs) would work out, but there might still be a good case for seed-funding the org if the founder is an obsessively committed DRI-type who "owns VAWG". 

I guess I'm generally wondering how to think about doing and supporting systemic change-y GHD interventions, so as to potentially use leverage to help even more people, at the cost of sacrificing confidence grounded in RCT evidence and MEL feedback. "Find and support DRIs, trusting they'll work it out" is the only proxy I can think of. 

Not sure how to articulate concisely so here's the braindump-y version. Nick has argued for "funding solutions not projects", e.g. AMF, New Incentives, OneDay Health, etc. I wonder what Nick thinks about funding people instead of specific solutions, in particular directly responsible individuals (DRIs), especially in more "complex systems change-y" GHD contexts like policy, market reform, health systems strengthening, etc where it might be very unclear which specific interventions are most impactful, and figuring this out requires not just "more research" but just trying -> failing -> sense-making -> reorienting -> trying differently etc, so it might make more sense to bet on people with track records of doing that. Concrete GHD-related examples for and against would be much appreciated :) don't think there are simple answers here. 

What about systematically fit-testing with cheap tests, per 80K's advice? This is the "be Alice, don't be Bob" approach; the information you learn from acting -> getting feedback -> sense-making -> reorienting -> acting ... is both much richer and more personally decision-relevant. Either way you shouldn't sacrifice WLB ("jog, don't sprint").