Quick takes
How to communicate EA to the commonsense Christian: has it been done before?
I'm considering writing a series of posts exploring the connection between EA and the common-sense Christianity one might encounter on the street if you were to ask someone about their 'faith.'
I've looked into EA for Christians a bit, and haven't done a deep dive into their articles yet. I'm wondering what the consensus is on this group, and if anyone involved can give me a synopsis on how that's been going. Has it been effective?
I'm posting this quick take as a means of feeling ou...
I'm both a Christian and an EA and have been involved with EA for Christians (EACH) for several years now. There's a whole community around EACH, and we have a Facebook Group and weekly (Sunday afternoon) Zoom call discussions on a different topic each week.
We also have their own conference separate from EA Global, that this year was hosted in Washington DC. I've gone to previous conferences that were virtual before, and also actually met some people in person at EA Global Washington DC 2022, where among other things I actually had a one-on-one with one of...
Given how bird flu is progressing (spread in many cows, virologists believing rumors that humans are getting infected but no human-to-human spread yet), this would be a good time to start a protest movement for biosafety/against factory farming in the US.
in This Week in Virology, Vincent Racaniello says that he had visited Ohio farmers, and said that farm workers were getting specifically conjunctivitis rather than respiratory infections. He mentioned this really casually.
This Week in Virology TWiV 1108: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin
Also this:
"every dairy that I've worked with has – with the exception of one – had sick human beings at the same time they had sick cows.” https://www.bovinevetonline.com/news/industry/message-ag-industry-about-h5n1
From this opinion piece by Zeynep Tüfekçi in the ...
A lot of policy research seems to be written with an agenda in mind to shape the narrative. And this kind of destroys the point of policy research which is supposed to inform stakeholders and not actively convince or really nudge them.
This might cause polarization in some topics and is in itself, probably snatching legitimacy away from the space.
I have seen similar concerning parallels in the non-profit space, where some third-sector actors endorse/do things which they see as being good but destroys trust in the
This gives me scary unilaterist's curse vibes..
In case you're interested in supporting my EA-aligned YouTube channel A Happier World:
I've lowered the minimum funding goal from $10,000 to $2,500 to give donors confidence that their money will directly support the project. Because if the minimum funding goal isn't reached, you won't get your money back. Instead it will go back in your Manifund balance for you to spend on a different project. I understand this may have been a barrier for some, which is why I lowered the minimum funding goal.
At this point, I'd be willing to buy out credit from anyone who obtains credit on Manifund, applies said credit to this project, and the project doesn't fund. Hopefully Manifund will find a more elegant solution for this kind of issue (there was a discussion on Discord last week) but this should work as a stopgap.
(Offer limited to $240, which is the current funding gap between current offers and the $2500 minimum.)
I can't find a better place to ask this, but I was wondering whether/where there is a good explanation of the scepticism of leading rationalists about animal consciousness/moral patienthood. I am thinking in particular of Zvi and Yudkowsky. In the recent podcast with Zvi Mowshowitz on 80K, the question came up a bit, and I know he is also very sceptical of interventions for non-human animals on his blog, but I had a hard time finding a clear explanation of where this belief comes from.
I really like Zvi's work, and he has been right about a lot of things I ...
First in-ovo sexing in the US
Egg Innovations announced that they are "on track to adopt the technology in early 2025." Approximately 300 million male chicks are ground up alive in the US each year (since only female chicks are valuable) and in-ovo sexing would prevent this.
UEP originally promised to eliminate male chick culling by 2020; needless to say, they didn't keep that commitment. But better late than never!
Congrats to everyone working on this, including @Robert - Innovate Animal Ag, who founded an organization devoted to pushing this tec...
I asked Google when chicken embryos start to feel pain and this was the first result (i.e. I didn't look hard and I didn't anchor on a figure):
A recent study by the Technical University of Munich in Germany measured chicken embryos' heart rate, brain activity, blood pressure and movements in response to potentially painful stimuli like heat and electricity and concluded that they didn't seem to feel them until at least day 13. (14 Oct 2023)
Very few of my peers are having kids. My husband and I are the youngest parents at the Princeton University daycare at 31 years old. The next youngest parent is 3 years older than us, and his kid is a year younger than ours. Considering median age of first birth at the national level is 30 years old, it seems like a potential problem that the national median is the Princeton minimum.
I wonder what the birth rate is specifically among American parents with/doing STEM PhDs. I'm guessing it's extremely low for people under the age of 45. Possibly low eno...
Some of this seems to be inherent to a modern society (High birth rates in past society were because of high mortality rates, women being treated as baby factories, etc.), but in my own experience the reason the birth rate is so low is that people simply can't afford to have children.
In Japan and South Korea, the "salaryman culture" is such that employees are expected to devote their entire lives to their employers, to the extent of sleeping in the office at times. Needless to say, this makes it extremely difficult to have a relationship.
In sho...
A corporation exhibits emergent behavior, over which no individual employee has full control. Because the unregulated market selects for profit and nothing else, any successful corporation becomes a kind of "financial paperclip optimizer". To prevent this, the economic system must change.
Paul Graham about getting good at technology (bold is mine):
...How do you get good at technology? And how do you choose which technology to get good at? Both of those questions turn out to have the same answer: work on your own projects. Don't try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most. You'll work much harder on something you're interested in than something you're doing because you think you're supposed to.
If you're
Everyone who seems to be writing policy papers/ doing technical work seems to be keeping generative AI at the back of their mind, when framing their work or impact.
This narrow-eyed focus on gen AI might almost certainly be net-negative for us- unknowingly or unintentionally ignoring ripple effects of the gen AI boom in other fields (like robotics companies getting more funding leading to more capabilities, and that leads to new types of risks).
And guess who benefits if we do end up getting good evals/standards in place for gen AI? It seem...
This WHO press release was a good reminder of the power of immunization – a new study forthcoming publication in The Lancet reports that (liberally quoting / paraphrasing the release)
- global immunization efforts have saved an estimated 154 million lives over the past 50 years, 146 million of them children under 5 and 101 million of them infants
- for each life saved through immunization, an average of 66 years of full health were gained – with a total of 10.2 billion full health years gained over the five decades
- measles vaccination accounted for 60% of t
American Philosophical Association (APA) announces two $10,000 AI2050 Prizes for philosophical work related to AI, with June 23, 2024 deadline:
https://dailynous.com/2024/04/25/apa-creates-new-prizes-for-philosophical-research-on-ai/
In order to be able to communicate about malaria from a fundraising perspective, it would be amazing if there would be a documentary about malaria. Personal compelling stories that anyone can relate to. Not about the science behind the disease, as that wouldn't work probably. Just like "An inconvenient truth", but then around Malaria. I am truly baffled I can't find anything close to what I was hoping would exist already. Anyone knows why this is? Or am I googling wrong?
In this "quick take", I want to summarize some my idiosyncratic views on AI risk.
My goal here is to list just a few ideas that cause me to approach the subject differently from how I perceive most other EAs view the topic. These ideas largely push me in the direction of making me more optimistic about AI, and less likely to support heavy regulations on AI.
(Note that I won't spend a lot of time justifying each of these views here. I'm mostly stating these points without lengthy justifications, in case anyone is curious. These ideas can perhaps inform ...
Explicit +1 to what Owen is saying here.
(Given that I commented with some counterarguments, I thought I would explicitly note my +1 here.)
My recommended readings/resources for community builders/organisers
- CEA's groups resource centre, naturally
- This handbook on community organising
- High Output Management by Andrew Groves
- How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit
- LifeLabs's coaching questions (great for 1-1s with organisers you're supporting/career coachees)
- The 2-Hour Cocktail Party
- Centola's work on social change, e.g., the book Change: How to Make Big Things Happen
- Han's work on organising, e.g., How Organisations Develop Activists (I wrote up some notes here)
- This 80k article on community
Consider donating all or most of your Mana on Manifold to charity before May 1.
Manifold is making multiple changes to the way Manifold works. You can read their announcement here. The main reason for donating now is that Mana will be devalued from the current 1 USD:100 Mana to 1 USD:1000 Mana on May 1. Thankfully, the 10k USD/month charity cap will not be in place until then.
Also this part might be relevant for people with large positions they want to sell now:
...One week may not be enough time for users with larger portfolios to liquidate and donate. We wa
Forum post saying the same thing, with some discussion: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SM3YzTsXmQ6BaFcsL/you-probably-want-to-donate-any-manifold-currency-this-week
Vaccines saved 150M+ lives over the past 50 years, including 100M+ infants and nearly 100M lives from Measles alone:
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/new-data-shows-vaccines-have-saved-154-million-lives-past-50-years
https://www.who.int/news/item/24-04-2024-global-immunization-efforts-have-saved-at-least-154-million-lives-over-the-past-50-years
This is an extremely "EA" request from me but I feel like we need a word for people (i.e. me) who are Vegans but will eat animal products if they're about to be thrown out. OpportuVegan? UtilaVegan?
I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer!
The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3
I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advis...
Congratulations to you for being accepted into the incubator program. Am still expecting mine as well.
Dustin Moskovitz claims "Tesla has committed consumer fraud on a massive scale", and "people are going to jail at the end"
https://www.threads.net/@moskov/post/C6KW_Odvky0/
Not super EA relevant, but I guess relevant inasmuch as Moskovitz funds us and Musk has in the past too. I think if this were just some random commentator I wouldn't take it seriously at all, but a bit more inclined to believe Dustin will take some concrete action. Not sure I've read everything he's said about it, I'm not used to how Threads works
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1783989456414085339/photo/1