TLDR: If you're an EA-minded animal funder donating $200K/year or more, we'd love to connect with you about several exciting initiatives that AIM is launching over the next several months.
AIM (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) has a history of incubating and supporting...
Hi, I am Charity Entrepreneurship (CE, now AIM) Director of Research. I wanted to quickly respond to this point.
– –
Quality of our reports
I would like to push back a bit on Joey's response here. I agree that our research is quicker scrappier and goes into less depth than other orgs, but I am not convinced that our reports have more errors or worse reasoning that reports of other organisations (thinking of non-peer reviewed global health and animal welfare organisations like GiveWell, OpenPhil, Animal Charity Evaluators, Rethink Priorities, Founders Pl...
This post summarizes "Against the Singularity Hypothesis," a Global Priorities Institute Working Paper by David Thorstad. This post is part of my sequence of GPI Working Paper summaries. For more, Thorstad’s blog, Reflective Altruism, has a three...
As you write:
The result will be a singularity, understood as a fundamental discontinuity in human history beyond which our fate depends largely on how we interact with artificial agents
The discontinuity is a result of humans no longer being the smartest agents in the world, and no longer being in control of our own fate. After this point, we've entered an event horizon where the output is almost entirely unforeseeable.
If you have accelerating growth that isn't sustained for very long, you get something like population growth from 1800-2000
If, a...
In theory of mind, the question of how to define an "individual" is complicated. If you're not familiar with this area of philosophy, see Wait But Why's introduction.
I think most people in EA circles subscribe to the computational theory of mind, which means that...
If you don't care about where or when duplicate experiences exist, only their number, then not caring about duplicates at all gives you a fanatical wager against the universe having infinitely many moral patients, e.g. by being infinitely large spatially, going on forever in time, having infinitely many pocket universes.
It would also give you a wager against the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, because there will be copies of you having identical experiences in (at least slightly) already physically distinct branches.
"The UN Secretary-General's AI Advisory Body has launched its Interim Report: Governing AI for Humanity. The report calls for a closer alignment between international norms and how AI is developed and rolled out. The central piece of the report is a proposal to strengthen international governance of AI by carrying out seven critical functions such as horizon scanning for risks and supporting international collaboration on data, and computing capacity and talent to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It also includes recommendations to enhance accountability and ensure an equitable voice for all countries."
Would be interested to know people's take on this. The final report, revised to take account of the submissions, will be presented in August 2024, in time for the UN's Summit of the Future in September. Both individual submissions and those on behalf of organisations are welcomed...
I understand posting this here, but for following up specific cases like this, especially second hand I think it's better to first contact OpenPhil before airing it publicly. Like you mentioned there is likely to be much context here we don't have, and it's hard to have a public discussion without most of the context.
"There is probably some more delicate way I could have handled this, but anything more complicated than writing this comment, would probably have ended up with me not taking action at all"
That's a fair comment I understand the importance of ov...
I’m Emma from the Communications team at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). I want to flag a few media items related to EA that have come out recently or will be coming out soon, given they’ll touch on topics—like FTX—that I expect will be of interest to Forum readers...
If EA currently
If you've read Leif's WIRED article or Poverty is No Pond & have questions for him, I'd love to share them with him & in turn share his answers here.
Thank you, M, for sharing this with me & encouraging me to connect.
I thought he spelled out his ETG criticism quite clearly in the article, so I’ll paraphrase what I imbibed here.
I think he would argue that, for the same person in the same job, donating X% of their money is a better thing. However, the ETG ethos that has hung around in the community promotes seeking out extremely high-paying jobs in order to donate even more money. These jobs often bring about more harms in turn (both in an absolute sense but possibly also to the point that ETG is net-negative, for example in the case of SBF), especially if we live in an economic system that rewards behaviour that profits off negative externalities.
This post was cross-posted from the substack Thing of Things with the permission of the author.
In defense of trying things out
The Economist recently published an article, “How poor Kenyans became economists’ guinea pigs,” which critiques development economists’ use of randomized...
Share your information in this thread if you are looking for full-time, part-time, or limited project work in EA causes[1]!
We’d like to help people in EA find impactful work, so we’ve set up this thread, and another called Who's hiring? (we did this last in 2022[2]).
Consider...