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This post is easily the weirdest thing I've ever written. I also consider it the best I've ever written - I hope you give it a chance. If you're not sold by the first section, you can safely skip the rest.
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Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement,...
Crosspost of my blog.
You shouldn’t eat animals in normal circumstances. That much is, in my view, quite thoroughly obvious. Animals undergo cruel, hellish conditions that we’d confidently describe as torture if they were inflicted on a human (or even a dog). No hamburger...
Thanks for tagging me, Johannes! I have not read the post, but in my mind one should overwhelmingly focus on minimising animal suffering in the context of food consumption. I estimate the harm caused by the annual food consumption of a random person is 159 times that caused by their annual GHG emissions.
Fig. 4 of Kuruc 2023 is relevant to the question. A welfare weight of 0.05 means that one values 0.05 units of welfare in humans as much as 1 unit of welfare in animals, and it would still require a social cost of carbon of over 7 k$/t for prioritising beed...
Concerns over AI safety and calls for government control over the technology are highly correlated but they should not be.
There are two major forms of AI risk: misuse and misalignment. Misuse risks come from humans using AIs as tools in dangerous ways. Misalignment risks...
I think you've failed to think on the margin here. I agree that the broad classes of regulation you point to here have *netted out* badly, but this says little about what the most thoughtful and determined actors in these spaces have achieved.
Classically, Germany's early 2000s investments in solar R&D had enormous positive externalities on climate and the people who pushed for those didn't have to support restricting nuclear power also. The option space for them was not "the net-bad energy policy that emerged" vs "libertarian paradise;" it was: "...
Many thanks to Andrew Snyder-Beattie and Joshua Monrad for their feedback during this project. This project was completed as part of contract work with Open Philanthropy, but the views and work expressed here do not represent those of Open Philanthropy. All thoughts are...
Thank you so much for flagging this! Very much agreed this is an important correction; the update that the US doesn't dominate the biosecurity spend this way is indeed important and I think a welcome one. Will certainly amend.
Anders Sandberg has written a “final report” released simultaneously with the announcement of FHI’s closure. The abstract and an excerpt follow.
...Normally manifestos are written first, and then hopefully stimulate actors to implement their vision. This document is the reverse
Thanks Rían, I appreciate it. And to be fair, this is from my perspective as much a me thing as it is an Oli thing. Like, I don't think the global optimal solution is an EA forum that's a cuddly little safe space for me. But we all have to make the tradeoffs that make most sense for us individually, and this kind of thing is costly for me.
I see way too many people confusing movement with progress in the policy space.
There can be a lot of drafts becoming bills with still significant room for regulatory capture in the specifics, which will be decided later on. Take risk levels, for instance, which are subjective - lots of legal leeway for companies to exploit.
Being involved in the EA community can be stressful — there are too many problems in the world, and each of us can only do so much. Feeling the need to work harder and do more can easily overwhelm us. So what’s the alternative? In this talk, Helen Toner describes a different...
Wonderful take on a sensitive topic!
I have personal experience with burnout and I came to almost exactly the same conclusions as Helen here did, to add a little more on it I've found focused attention is best pursued with a limitation, I use a modified pomodoro technique to make sure I'm resting an adequate amount during even the busiest of workdays.
I’m an international security professional with experience conducting open source analysis, satellite imagery interpretation, and independent research, and I’m launching a new consulting organization, Earthnote! I’m really interested in applying my skills to the EA community...
This seems like an impressive set of capabilities, exciting to hear about the new org :)
Did CSER write more about your work for them anywhere? Interested to read more about it.
Let me start by saying that I am very disappointed and have lost a lot of my trust in effective altruism organizations. Effective altruists say they will help far away parts of the world, but they don't seem to be able to help each other properly. Some may argue that we are excluded from help because we are citizens of wealthy countries, but I believe that we cannot help others when we do not even possess the basic virtue of helping one another (yes, I am appealing to virtue ethics).
Problem of signaling
If there's one thing I really learned from Robin Hanson, it's the importance of signaling. For us, signaling is important, and values are determined by culture, not philosophy. We simply say, “I am an effective altruist!!” Don't expect people to unconditionally believe in and support your goals. The reason for FHI's recent closure is unclear, but it seems clear that coordination...
Loved this post!