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33
harfe
11h
2
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 want to work individually with anyone who feels like they are stuck in this situation and honor their expected returns and agree on an amount they can donate at the original 100:1 rate past the one week deadline once the relevant markets have resolved.
Animal Justice Appreciation Note Animal Justice et al. v A.G of Ontario 2024 was recently decided and struck down large portions of Ontario's ag-gag law. A blog post is here. The suit was partially funded by ACE, which presumably means that many of the people reading this deserve partial credit for donating to support it. Thanks to Animal Justice (Andrea Gonsalves, Fredrick Schumann, Kaitlyn Mitchell, Scott Tinney), co-applicants Jessica Scott-Reid and Louise Jorgensen, and everyone who supported this work!
GiveWell and Open Philanthropy just made a $1.5M grant to Malengo! Congratulations to @Johannes Haushofer and the whole team, this seems such a promising intervention from a wide variety of views
Quote from VC Josh Wolfe: > Biology. We will see an AWS moment where instead of you having to be a biotech firm that opens your own wet lab or moves into Alexandria Real Estate, which is you know, specializes in hosting biotech companies, in in all these different regions approximate to academic research centers. You will be able to just take your experiment and upload it to the cloud where there are cloud-based robotic labs. We funded some of these. There's one company called Stratios. > > There's a ton that are gonna come on wave, and this is exciting because you can be a scientist on the beach in the Bahamas, pull up your iPad, run an experiment. The robots are performing 90% of the activity of Pouring something from a beaker into another, running a centrifuge, and then the data that comes off of that. > > And this is the really cool part. Then the robot and the machines will actually say to you, “Hey, do you want to run this experiment but change these 4 parameters or these variables?” And you just click a button “yes” as though it's reverse prompting you, and then you run another experiment. So the implication here is that the boost in productivity for science, for generation of truth, of new information, of new knowledge, That to me is the most exciting thing. And the companies that capture that, forget about the societal dividend, I think are gonna make a lot of money. https://overcast.fm/+5AWO95pnw/46:15
2
Otto
6h
0
High impact startup idea: make a decent carbon emissions model for flights. Current ones simply use flight emissions which makes direct flights look low-emission. But in reality, some of these flights wouldn't even be there if people could be spread over existing indirect flights more efficiently, which is why they're cheaper too. Emission models should be relative to counterfactual. The startup can be for-profit. If you're lucky, better models already exist in scientific literature. Ideal for the AI for good-crowd. My guess is that a few man-years work could have a big carbon emissions impact here.

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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

...
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7
Rían O.M
3h
This makes me sad as I enjoy reading your comments and find them insightful. That said, I understand and support your reasoning. I feel as though some amount of "mistake mindset" has disappeared a little in the two years I've been reading the forum. 
14
Sean_o_h
3h
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 don't think the global optimal solution is an EA forum that's a cuddly little safe space for me.

I agree with this, but also think the forum "not being cuddly for Sean" and "not driving contributors away" aren't mutually exclusive. Maybe I am not seeing all the tradeoffs though. 

harfe posted a Quick Take 11h ago

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 ...

Continue reading
Luke Moore commented on Priors and Prejudice 2h ago
60
3

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.

I

Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement,...

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Loved this post! 

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You'll get a weekly email with the best posts from the past week. The Forum team selects the posts to feature based on personal preference and Forum popularity, and also adds some announcements and a classic post.

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...

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8
jackva
3h
@Vasco Grillo would be well-placed to do the math here, but I have the strong intuition that under most views giving some weight to animal welfare the marginal climate damage from additional beef consumption will be outweighed by animal suffering reduction by a large margin.  

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... (read more)

1
Vidur Kapur
3h
Even within the dairy and red meat categories, there are ways to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions. Milk is better than cheese, and lamb is better than beef. Also, mussels and oysters do well on climate and (probably) welfare grounds.
Mjreard commented on AI Regulation is Unsafe 2h ago

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...

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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: "... (read more)

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...

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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.

Heramb Podar posted a Quick Take 3h ago

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. 

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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...

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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...

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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.