I have not researched longtermism deeply. However, what I have found out so far leaves me puzzled and skeptical. As I currently see it, you can divide what longtermism cares about into two categories:
1) Existential risk.
2) Common sense long-term priorities, such as:
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Anna Maybach Sullivan is a Grants Associate at Open Philanthropy. She supports Open Phil’s grantmaking from the operations side by working directly with grantees and Open Phil’s external funding partners to disburse grants as smoothly and efficiently as possible. She received a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and completed a Postbac at Columbia University.
The Grants team supports Open Philanthropy’s mission to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us by processing...
We are excited to be launching the Center for Space Governance, a non-profit research organization dedicated to exploring current, emerging, and future issues in space policy. We aim to define and map the field of space governance, advancing effective solutions to address...
Hi team. How active is the Center for Space Governance currently? What are your plans for the next two years, if any?
Probably Good is searching for an Executive Director to take the reins and lead the organization in its mission to help more people use their career to make a positive impact at scale. If you’re not familiar, Probably Good’s main activities are research into high-impact career paths, publishing online content, and providing one-on-one advising.
Our reach has been growing rapidly, with more than 100,000 page views in 2023 and 449% year-on-year monthly organic (unpaid) traffic growth. Through ads, we can cause a new user to counterfactually read an entire article on the site (such as a career guide chapter or career profile) for a marginal cost of roughly $1. We believe this presents an exciting opportunity for impact, but our work so far has been bottlenecked by management capacity. As a result, we are excited to search for an executive director who can empower Probably Good to reach ...
Healthier Hens (HH) aims to improve cage-free hen welfare, focusing on key issues such as keel bone fractures (KBFs). In the last 6 months, we’ve conducted a vet training in Kenya, found a 42% KBF prevalence, and are exploring alternative promising interventions in collaboration with the Welfare Footprint Project, publishing transferrable findings along the way. Our staff satisfaction remains high, but concerns about operational capacity are on the rise. We're deciding on future strategies, considering funding and organizational changes. Our budget for Y3 (‘23 Sep - ‘24 Sep) is $65k-$135k, with a $0-70k funding gap.
In this post, we share key updates, lessons learned and our plans for immediate next steps. We hope others can benefit from what we’re observing and our attempts to identify promising pathways towards improved hen health and welfare. We welcome feedback from the community...
TLDR; Participate online or in-person on the weekend 3rd to 5th May in an exciting and fun AI safety research hackathon focused on demonstrating and extrapolating risks to democracy from real-life threat models. We invite researchers, cybersecurity professionals, and governance experts to join but it is open for everyone, and we will introduce starter code templates to help you kickstart your team's projects. Join here.
Despite some of the largest potential risks from AI being related to our democratic institutions and the fragility of society, there is surprisingly little work demonstrating and extrapolating concrete risks from AI to democracy.
By putting together actual demonstrations of potential dangers and mindfully extrapolating these risks into the late 2020s, we can raise awareness among key decision-makers and stakeholders, thus driving the development...
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...
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The topics of working for an EA org and altruist careers are discussed occasionally in our local group.
I wanted to share my rough thoughts and some relevant forum posts that I've compiled in this google doc. The main thesis is that it's really difficult to get a job at an EA org, as far as I know, and most people will have messier career paths.
Some of the posts I link in the doc, specifically around alternate career paths:
The career and the community
Consider a wider range of jobs, paths and problems if you want to improve the long-term future
My current impressions on career choice for longtermists
Epistemic status: 97.75% certain.
For most of history, physical prowess and stature have been important. If you lived during pre-agricultural times, being taller and more agile would have made you a more capable hunter and gatherer. In confrontations with other...
One potential downside: shorter people means less physical capacity, as somewhat mentioned in the above area. I agree that most recources would be [doubled*], but recources that require physical labor will be comparatively twice as slow, perhaps having a nagative inmact on the economy. I'm not sure if "the doubling" offsets this. Epistemic status: "Idk tho"
Maybe? This depends on what you think about the probability that intelligent life re-evolves on earth (it seems likely to me) and how good you feel about the next intelligent species on earth vs humans.
IMO, most x-risk from AI probably doesn't come from literal human extinction but instead AI s... (read more)