Posts tagged community
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Let's hang out and get to know each other in the community! We will have several rounds of 1:1 or small group chats to hear what other Data Scientists are interested in and make new connections in the community.
You can give me anonymous feedback about anything you want here.
Summary
- Interventions in the effective altruism community are usually assessed under 2 different frameworks, existential risk mitigation, and nearterm welfare improvement.
- It looks like 2 distinct
Can you give an example of what might count as "spending to save lives in wars 1k times as deadly" in this context?
For example, if one was comparing wars involding 10 k or 10 M deaths, the latter would be more likely to involve multiple great power, in which case it would make more sense to improve relationships between NATO, China and Russia.
...Thinking about the amounts we might be willing to spend on interventions that save lives in 100-death wars vs 100k-death wars, it intuitively feels like 251x is a way better multiplier than 63,000. So where am I going
Written by Claude, and very lightly edited.
In a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast, guest Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and the Blueprint project, laid out a thought-provoking perspective on what he sees as the most important challenge and opportunity of our...
This is an extremely rich guy who isn't donating any of his money.
FWIW, I totally don't consider "donating" a necessary component of taking effective altruistic action. Most charities seem much less effective than for-profit organizations, and most of the good in the world seems achieved by for-profit companies.
I don't have a particularly strong take on Bryan Johnson, but using "donations" as a proxy seems pretty bad to me.
Regulators should review the 2014 DeepMind acquisition. When Google bought DeepMind in 2014, no regulator, not the FTC, not the EC's DG COMP, nor the CMA, scrutinized the impact. Why? AI startups have high value but low revenues. And so they avoid regulation (...
Less than a year ago Deepmind and Google Brain were two separate companies (both making cutting-edge contributions to AI development). My guess is if you broke off Deepmind from Google you would now just pretty quickly get competition between Deepmind and Google Brain (and more broadly just make the situation around slowing things down a more multilateral situation).
But more concretely, anti-trust action makes all kinds of coordination harder. After an anti-trust action that destroyed billions of dollars in economic value, the ability to get people in the same room and even consider coordinating goes down a lot, since that action itself might invite further anti-trust action.
Edge of Existence
The risk of human extinction has never been higher. Recent years have seen a global pandemic, a renewed nuclear threat and runaway climate change. New research predicts a 1 in 6 chance that life as we know it won't make it to the end of this century. This compelling science documentary looks at the greatest risks to humanity and what we can do about it. Are we all doomed?
“I really needed to hear that”
His eyes were downcast, his normally jocular expression now solemn. I had really said something that had spoken to him, that had begun to assuage some hurt which had before remained unacknowledged.
It’s not your fault. Four words.
Later, I was...
University of Arizona group organizer here; everything you've talked about are things that we have tried to reconcile with. But, having not yet faced a lot of those extreme changes in leadership, significant burnout, etc I believe we are struggling to fully internalize the consequences. And just because the symptoms haven't been made readily apparent, doesn't mean that the same underlying conditions aren't there in our organization.
The largest thing we have tried (and to a large extent, I believe failed in) is prioritizing the organizers themselves as an e...
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Im intrigued where people stand on the threshold where farmed animal lives might become net positive? I'm going to share a few scenarios i'm very unsure about and id love to hear thoughts or be pointed towards research on this.
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Animals kept in homesteads in rural Uganda
I suppose I agree with this. And I've been mulling over why it still seems like the wrong way to think about it to me, and I think it's that I find it rather short-termist. In the short term if farms shut down they might be replaced with nature, with even less happy animals, it's true. But in the long term opposing speciesism is the only way to achieve a world with happy beings. Clearly the kinds of farms @NickLaing is talking about, with lives worth living but still pretty miserable, are not optimal. Figuring out whether they are worth living or not seems only relevant to trying to reduce suffering in the short term, but not so much in the long term, because in the long term this isn't what we want anyway.
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...
Vasco, I've read your post to which the first link leads quickly, so please correct me if I'm wrong. However, it left me wondering about two things:
(a) It wasn't clear to me that the estimate of global heating damages was counting global heating damages to non-humans. The references to DALYs and 'climate change affecting more people with lower income' lead me to suspect you're not. But non-humans will surely be the vast majority of the victims of global heating--as well as, in some cases, its beneficiaries. While Timothy Chan is quite right to point ...
Unfortunately there were some technical difficulties with the Zoom link. Thanks for those who found the new room. Also keep the conversation going on our slack channel - https://join.slack.com/share/enQtNzAyMjc2MTYzNTUyMS01NTg3MmVjODc3ZDk4ZTlkNzg3ZmMyNmE0NTc3ZjdjMWJiMWI0ODliOTJkYTYyOWNmNDhkZWU5NGIyMTVhYWEw (expires in 14 days).