From the Table of Contents, you might've guessed that this post makes different offerings to different people making personal growth investments.
It's built like a playlist for your interests. Jumping to sections that beckon your interests is a great way to navigate...
Most things you use and particularly the food we consume rely on an intact global supply chain. Without trade, essential resources such as fertilizers would become inaccessible, making food production much harder. This post aims to provide an overview of the current trade system, highlighting its potential vulnerabilities and exploring the factors that have contributed to this state. The focus is on food trade given its importance and vulnerability.
A good overview of the state of the trade system is given in D’Odorico et al. (2014), which tracks global flows of food via trade data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). They find that around a quarter of the food we produce is traded and that this share has increased in recent decades. Also the amount of food we trade increases quicker than the food we produce. This...
As you may have noticed, 80k After Hours has been releasing a new show where I and some other 80k staff sit down with a guest for a very free form, informal, video(!) discussion that sometimes touches on topical themes around EA and sometimes… strays a bit further afield...
I also had a bit of a harder time following than with "pro podcasts", but I think that is because I have a default 1.8x speed increase and aggressive trimming of silences. That works fine for the typical podcast sound and cadence but I agree it got a bit intense with these (sorry, I could not be bothered with changing the playback speed).
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...
He said he was on a panel at EA Global and mentions PlayPumps, a favourite EA example in this 2015 post. Here's the YouTube video of the EA Global panel discussion.
Executive summary: Sustainable fishing policies and demand reductions for wild-caught aquatic animals may counterintuitively increase fishing catch in the near term, but persistent demand reductions could potentially decrease catch over longer timelines.
Key points:
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...
In particular, I am persuaded by the argument that, because evaluation is usually easier than generation, it should be feasible to accurately evaluate whether a slightly-smarter-than-human AI is taking unethical actions, allowing us to shape its rewards during training accordingly. After we've aligned a model that's merely slightly smarter than humans, we can use it to help us align even smarter AIs, and so on, plausibly implying that alignment will scale to indefinitely higher levels of intelligence, without necessarily breaking down at any physically realistic point.
This reasoning seems to imply that you could use GPT-2 to oversee GPT-4 by boostrapping from a chain of models of scales between GPT-2 and GPT-4. However, this isn't true, the weak-to-strong generalization paper finds that this doesn't work and indeed bootstrapping like this doesn't help at all for ChatGPT reward modeling (it helps on chess puzzles and for nothing else they investigate I believe).
I think this sort of bootstrapping argument might work if we could ensure that the each model in the chain was sufficiently aligned and capable of reasoning that it would carefully reason about what humans would want if they were more knowledgeable and then rate outputs based on this. However, I don't think GPT-4 is either aligned enough or capable enough that we see this behavior. And I still think it's unlikely it works under these generous assumptions (though I won't argue for this here).
In fact, it is difficult for me to name even a single technology that I think is currently underregulated by society.
The obvious example would be synthetic biology, gain-of-function research, and similar.
I also think AI itself is currently massively underregulated even entirely ignoring alignment difficulties. I think the probability of the creation of AI capable of accelerating AI R&D by 10x this year is around 3%. It would be extremely bad for US national interests if such an AI was stolen by foreign actors. This suffices for regulation ensuring very high levels of security IMO. And this is setting aside ongoing IP theft and similar issues.
The obvious example would be synthetic biology, gain-of-function research, and similar.
Can you explain why you suspect these things should be more regulated than they currently are?
Pandemic security aims to safeguard the future of civilization from exponentially spreading biological threats. Despite the world's failure to contain SARS-CoV-2, the existence of far more lethal and transmissible pathogens that afflict animals...
I am surprised I only now discovered this paper. In addition to Jeff's excellent points above, what stood out to me was that the paper contained both likelihoods of different scenarios as well as what I think is some of the more transparent reasoning behind these likelihood numbers. And the numbers are uncomfortably high!
There is more detail on how the likelihoods were arrived at in the paper itself - the last column is only a summary.
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
Glad it was helpful! Happy to see that you utilized the 'playlist'-type function of this to kick off these thoughts
This sounds like a nice process you've carved out for yourself. Always pleased to see when people are at such an advanced position in being conscientious about their growth.
Similar to what it sounds like your process is, my sense is that the best frequency for working with most coaches/therapists follows an 'organic cadence' that's tied to particular phases and occasions. It seems like, in most cases, consistent indefinite sessions are m... (read more)