Most people avoid saying literally false things, especially if those could be audited, like making up facts or credentials. The reasons for this are both moral and pragmatic — being caught out looks really bad, and sustaining lies is quite hard, especially over time. Let...
Summary: This post documents research by SatisfIA, an ongoing project on non-maximizing, "aspiration-based" designs for AI agents that fulfill goals specified by constraints ("aspirations") rather than maximizing an objective function. We aim to contribute to AI safety...
Executive summary: The SatisfIA project explores aspiration-based AI agent designs that avoid maximizing objective functions, aiming to increase safety by allowing more flexibility in decision-making while still providing performance guarantees.
Key points:
This announcement was written by Toby Tremlett, but don’t worry, I won’t answer the questions for Lewis.
Lewis Bollard, Program Director of Farm Animal Welfare at Open Philanthropy, will be holding an AMA on Wednesday 8th of May. Put all your questions for him on this thread...
What is your take of the impact of fishing on animal welfare? When it comes to aquatic lives, why should we only focus on farmed aquatic life, not fishing? Why not prioritise work towards the ban of all fishing, esp. industrial fishing?
Some info: fishing alone is responsible for 90% of all lives killed per year for consumption, fishing is also destroying wild aquatic life habitats more than we destroy lands, and it also is affecting all wild lives that depend on them to survive: it is pretty much the largest ecocide in the world, and it is legalized. All t...
I've been thinking about community improvement and I realise I don't know of any examples where a community had a flaw and fixed it without some deeply painful process.
Often there are discussions of flaws within EA with some implied notion that communities in general are...
Changing the language they used
My dance group switched from gendered terms for the roles to non-gendered (blog post) and from calling one of the dance moves "Gypsy" to "right shoulder round". This didn't involve strife in our specific community, though other dance communities had serious rifts over these two issues.
In the gendered terms case, our transition was the outcome of a long process with the community, including talking about various term options, trial dances, and then polling. We needed to do it this way because role terms are very visible.
In ...
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
I think many people have a voting power of 9. I do, and I know many people with more karma than me.
Welcome! Use this thread to introduce yourself or ask questions about anything that confuses you.
PS- this thread is usually entitled "Open thread", but I'm experimenting with a more descriptive title this time.
The "Guide to norms on...
Hi, I'm Sebastian. I'm a mathematics graduate that spent the last two years in entrepreneurship. About nine months ago, I started to actively engage with EA through the Biosecurity Fundamentals course by BlueDot Impact (although I've known about EA for a long time).
My current focus is biosecurity. I am particularly interested in biotech aspects such as DNA synthesis screening, wastewater surveillance and vaccine development. Since my expertise is mostly in data analysis, computation and software development (as opposed to bioinformatics or virology) I'm st...
TL;DR: Insider activism covers examples of concerned citizens participating in activism within or against the institutions they work in. This can occur due to natural conflicts of values or when a group of aligned people enter a particular organisation with the intention...
Awesome, sure that would be great experience for using similar collective action in other causes! Had similar thoughts when writing this, although we focus on animal advocacy in principle all our approach reports could be used for other asks in other cause areas. I'd be interested in takes from those working in these domains
Great idea, for the more risky actions that could be a good approach if there are aligned unions. Do you think this is something you could have got the unions you helped on board with? Either animal advocacy or other potentially impactful causes?
Once it finishes selling all of its assets, the company will have as much as $16.3 billion in cash to distribute, according to a company statement. It owes customers and other non-governmental creditors about $11 billion.
Depending on the type of claim they hold in the case, some creditors could recover as much as 142% of what they are owed. The vast majority of customers, however, will likely get paid 118% of what they had on the FTX platform the day the company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
...Earlier this year, the company had about $6.4 billion in cash. The increase is due mostly to a general spike in prices for various cryptocurrencies, including Solana, a token heavily backed by convicted fraudster and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. The company has also sold dozens other assets, including various venture-capital projects like a stake in the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic
Executive summary: Deep honesty, which involves explaining what you actually believe rather than trying to persuade others, can lead to better outcomes and deeper trust compared to shallow honesty, despite potential risks.
Key points:
- Shallow honesty means not saying false things, while deep honesty means explaining your true beliefs without trying to manage the other party's reactions.
- Deep honesty equips others to make best use of their private information along with yours, strengthening relationships, though it carries risks if not well-received.
- Deep hones
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