EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)
345 episodes - English - Latest episode: 13 days ago - ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsAudio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts and posts with 125+ karma.
If you'd like more episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (All audio)" podcast instead.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
“AIM’s new guide to launching a high-impact non-profit policy organization” by CE, weeatquince
April 15, 2024 13:40 - 2 minutes - 1.97 MBAuthor: Sam Hilton, AIM Director of Research In March 2021 I received an odd letter. It was from a guy I didn't know, David Quarrey, the UK's National Security Advisor. The letter thanked me for providing external expertise to the UK government's Integrated Review, which had been published that morning. It turns out that the Integrated Review has made a public commitment to "review our approach to risk assessment" ... "including how we account for interdependencies, cascading and compound...
“Understanding FTX’s crimes” by FTXwatcher
April 11, 2024 19:00 - 43 minutes - 29.8 MBIn the aftermath of SBF's convinction, there have been a few posts trying to make sense of FTX. Some people are trying to figure out what happened, and some people are interested in trying to find clever defenses. I'm in a much more boring position: I am confident SBF is the fraud the world believes him to be. I hope this post can provide reasoning transparency on why I think this, and perhaps serve as an easy link for others who feel similarly but don't want to get bogged down in a poin...
“The Rationale-Shaped Hole At The Heart Of Forecasting” by dschwarz, FutureSearch, Lawrence Phillips, hnykda, Peter Mühlbacher
April 08, 2024 12:30 - 24 minutes - 16.5 MBThanks to Eli Lifland, Molly Hickman, Değer Turan, and Evan Miyazono for reviewing drafts of this post. The opinions expressed here are my own. Summary: Forecasters produce reasons and models that are often more valuable than the final forecasts Most of this value is being lost due to the historical practice & incentives of forecasting, and the difficulty of crowds to “adversarially collaborate” FutureSearch is a forecasting system with legible reasons and models at its core (examp...
“UK moves toward mandatory animal welfare labelling” by AdamC
April 07, 2024 13:20 - 2 minutes - 1.8 MBHere in the UK, the government is consulting on mandatory animal welfare labelling (closing 7 May 2024). People may wish to respond if they want to express their support or share thoughts and evidence that could shape the outcomes. I think such labelling has the potential to significantly improve animal welfare, not just through changing individual choices but by encouraging companies to stop selling the lowest welfare tiers entirely, and through raising labelling standards over time. Hig...
“Why hasn’t EA done an SBF investigation and postmortem?” by RobBensinger
April 03, 2024 14:00 - 3 minutes - 2.55 MBIs anyone in the world being paid to do an independent investigation of how EA handled Sam Bankman-Fried, with respect to "did we screw up" and "is there stuff we should do differently going forward"? Last I heard, literally nobody was doing this and at least some EA leaders were mostly just hoping that SBF gets memoryholed — but maybe I'm out of the loop? My understanding is that Effective Ventures completed a narrow investigation into this topic in mid-2023, purely looking at legal ri...
“Quick Update on Leaving the Board of EV” by Rebecca Kagan
April 03, 2024 02:50 - 2 minutes - 1.7 MBA brief and belated update: When I resigned from the board of EV US last year, I was planning on writing about that decision. But I ultimately decided against doing that for a variety of reasons, including that it was very costly to me, and I believed it wouldn’t make a difference. However, I want to make it clear that I resigned last year due to significant disagreements with the board of EV and EA leadership, particularly concerning their actions leading up to and after the FTX crisis. ...
“Announcing Mandatory Draft Amnesty Day (April 2nd)” by tobytrem
April 02, 2024 07:10 - 1 minute - 836 KBFollowing the success of Draft Amnesty Week, the Forum team have decided to take things a bit further. April 2nd 2024 will be Mandatory Amnesty Day (aka MAD). At 09:00 UTC, all draft posts on your Forum account will be posted live on the Forum. All the posts in this section on your profile page deserve to be seen. If you have used our Google Docs import feature, all posts we detect on your Google account will also be posted. Shrek is now the de facto mascot of Draft Amnesty. If, for...
“Announcement: We are rebranding to Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy” by Impactful Animal Advocacy, Aaron Boddy
April 01, 2024 21:40 - 3 minutes - 2.12 MBImpactful Animal Advocacy is thrilled to announce that after careful consideration and complex moral calculations, we have decided to rebrand to Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy. Why shrimp, you ask? Well, we've crunched the numbers and determined that improving the welfare of shrimp is one of the highest-impact opportunities in the animal advocacy space. Source: https://foodimpacts.org/ In light of this strong evidence, Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy will be laser-focusing all of our ef...
“Excerpts From The EA Talmud” by Scott Alexander
April 01, 2024 20:30 - 11 minutes - 7.75 MB(aka "surely we have enough Jews here that at least one person finds this funny") MISHNA: Rabbi Ord says that the three permissible cause areas are global health and development, animal welfare, and long-termism. Why are these the three permissible cause areas? Because any charity outside of these cause areas is a violation of bal tashchit, the prohibition against wasting resources. GEMARA: And why not four categories, because global health and development are two separate categories? R...
“EA is now scandal-constrained” by Guy Raveh
April 01, 2024 16:10 - 1 minute - 1.18 MBIt's been at least a few months since the last proper EA scandals, and we're now desperately trying to squeeze headlines out of the past ones. On the contrary, a few scandals have been wrapped up: SBF was sentenced to 25 years in prison The investigation regarding Owen Cotton-Barratt presented its findings Whytham Abbey is being sold Indeed, even OpenPhil's involvement in the Whytham Abbey sale shows they're now less willing to fund new scandals. Therefore it seems to me that EA...
“The Centre for Effective Altruism is spinning out of the Centre for Effective Altruism” by OllieBase
April 01, 2024 14:50 - 1 minute - 1.23 MBThe Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), an effective altruism (EA) project which recently spun out of Effective Ventures (EV) is spinning out of the newly established Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). The current CEO of CEA (the Centre for Effective Altruism), Zach Robinson, CEO of CEA and Effective Ventures (CEOCEV), will be taking the position of Chief Executive Administrator (CEA) for CEA (CEA), as the venture spins out of CEA (CEA). The cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) for this...
[Linkpost] “Introducing Open Asteroid Impact” by Linch, Austin
April 01, 2024 13:30 - 2 minutes - 2 MB“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Hillary Clinton, who is still alive I'm proud and excited to announce the founding of my new startup, Open Asteroid Impact, where we redirect asteroids towards Earth for the benefit of humanity. Our mission is to have as high an impact as possible. Below, I've copied over the one-pager I've sent potential investors and early employees: Name: Open Asteroid Impact Launch Date: April 1 2024 Website: openasteroidimpact.org Mission:...
[Linkpost] “Open Philanthropy: Our Progress in 2023 and Plans for 2024” by Alexander_Berger
March 31, 2024 06:20 - 4 minutes - 3.21 MBLike many organizations, Open Philanthropy has had multiple founding moments. Depending on how you count, we will be either seven, ten, or thirteen years old this year. Regardless of when you start the clock, it's possible that we’ve changed more in the last two years than over our full prior history. We’ve more than doubled the size of our team (to ~110), nearly doubled our annual giving (to >$750M), and added five new program areas. As our track record and volume of giving have grown, w...
“Announcement on the future of Wytham Abbey” by Rob Gledhill
March 30, 2024 04:10 - 1 minute - 710 KBThe Wytham Abbey Project is closing. After input from the Abbey's major donors, the EV board took a decision to sell the property. This project's runway will run out at the end of April. After this time, the project will cease operations, and EV UK will oversee the sale of the property. The Wytham Abbey team have been good custodians of the venue during the time they ran this project, and EV UK will continue to look after this property as we prepare to sell. The proceeds of the sale, after ...
“Killing the moths” by Bella
March 25, 2024 16:21 - 8 minutes - 5.85 MBThis post was partly inspired by, and shares some themes with, this Joe Carlsmith post. My post (unsurprisingly) expresses fewer concepts with less clarity and resonance, but is hopefully of some value regardless. Content warning: description of animal death. I live in a small, one-bedroom flat in central London. Sometime in the summer of 2023, I started noticing moths around my flat. I didn’t pay much attention to it, since they seemed pretty harmless: they obviously weren’t food mot...
“Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism” by NunoSempere
March 25, 2024 13:30 - 1 minute - 804 KBI've been writing a few posts critical of EA over at my blog. They might be of interest to people here: Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism Alternative Visions of Effective Altruism Auftragstaktik Hurdles of using forecasting as a tool for making sense of AI progress Brief thoughts on CEA's stewardship of the EA Forum Why are we not harder, better, faster, stronger? ...and there are a few smaller pieces on my blog as well. I appreciate comments and perspectives anywhe...
“Updates on Community Health Survey Results” by David_Moss, Jamie Elsey, Willem Sleegers
March 25, 2024 10:00 - 22 minutes - 15.2 MBSatisfaction with the EA community Reported satisfaction, from 1 (Very dissatisfied) to 10 (Very satisfied), in December 2023/January 2024 was lower than when we last measured it shortly after the FTX crisis at the end of 2022 (6.77 vs. 6.99, respectively). However, December 2023/January 2024 satisfaction ratings were higher than what people recalled their satisfaction being “shortly after the FTX collapse” (and their recalled level of satisfaction was lower than what we measured thei...
“The current limiting factor for new charities” by Joey, CE
March 21, 2024 06:50 - 2 minutes - 2.04 MBTLDR: we think the limiting factor for new charities has shifted from founder talent to early stage funding being the top limiting factor. We have historically written about limiting factors and how they affect our thinking about the highest impact areas. For new charities, over the past 4-5 years, fairly consistently, the limiting factor has been people; specifically, the fairly rare founder profile that we look for and think has the best chance at founding a field-leading charity. Howev...
“The Lack of EA in US Private Foundations” by Kyle Smith
March 21, 2024 05:20 - 3 minutes - 2.31 MBI've written before about trying to bring US private foundations into EA as major funders. I got some helpful feedback and haven't really pursued it further. I study US private foundations as a researcher and recently conducted a qualitative data collection of staff at 20 very large US private foundations ($100m+ assets). The subject of the study isn't directly EA related (focused mostly on how they use accounting/effectiveness information and accountability), but it got me thinking a lot! ...
“The Scale of Fetal Suffering in Late-Term Abortions” by Ariel Simnegar
March 20, 2024 17:40 - 5 minutes - 4.03 MBThis is a draft amnesty post. Summary. It seems plausible that fetuses can suffer from 12 weeks of age, and quite reasonable that then can suffer from 24 weeks of age. Some late-term abortion procedures seem that they might cause a fetus excruciating suffering. Over 35,000 of these procedures occur each year in the US alone. Further research would be desired on interventions to reduce this suffering, such as mandating fetal anesthesia for late-term abortions. Background Most pe...
“EA ‘Worldviews’ Need Rethinking” by Richard Y Chappell
March 19, 2024 05:40 - 5 minutes - 4.03 MBI like Open Phil's worldview diversification. But I don't think their current roster of worldviews does a good job of justifying their current practice. In this post, I'll suggest a reconceptualization that may seem radical in theory but is conservative in practice. Something along these lines strikes me as necessary to justify giving substantial support to paradigmatic Global Health & Development charities in the face of competition from both Longtermist/x-risk and Animal Welfare competito...
“We Did It! - Victory for Octopus in Washington State” by Tessa @ ALI
March 18, 2024 11:00 - 6 minutes - 4.47 MBIn 2022, Aquatic Life Institute (ALI) led the charge in Banding Together to Ban Octopus Farming. In 2024, we are ecstatic to see these efforts come to fruition in Washington State. This landmark achievement underscores our collective commitment to rejecting the introduction of additional animals into the seafood system and positions Washington State as a true pioneer in aquatic animal welfare legislation. In light of this success, ALI is joining forces with various organizations to advoc...
“Maternal Health Initiative is Shutting Down” by Ben Williamson, Sarah Eustis-Guthrie
March 16, 2024 10:00 - 37 minutes - 25.8 MBMaternal Health Initiative (MHI) was founded out of Charity Entrepreneurship (AIM)'s 2022 Incubation Program and has since piloted two interventions integrating postpartum (post-birth) contraceptive counselling into routine care appointments in Ghana. We concluded this pilot work in December 2023. A stronger understanding of the context and impact of postpartum family planning work, on the back of our pilot results, has led us to conclude that our intervention is not among the most cost-...
[Linkpost] “What are the biggest misconceptions about biosecurity and pandemic risk?” by 80000_Hours
March 15, 2024 14:10 - 25 minutes - 17.3 MBby Anemone Franz and Tessa Alexanian 80,000 Hours ranks preventing catastrophic pandemics as one of the most pressing problems in the world, and we have advised many of our readers to work in biosecurity to have high-impact careers. But biosecurity is a complex field, and while the threat is undoubtedly large, there's a lot of disagreement about how best to conceptualise and mitigate the risks. We wanted to get a better sense of how the people thinking about these threats every day perc...
[Linkpost] “New video: You’re richer than you realise” by GraceAdams, Giving What We Can
March 13, 2024 22:30 - 1 minute - 796 KBThis might be one of the best pieces of introductory content to the concepts of effective giving that GWWC has produced in recent years! I hit the streets of London to engage with everyday people about their views on charity, giving back, and where they thought they stood on the global income scale. This video was made to engage people with some of the core concepts of income inequality and charity effectiveness in the hope of getting more people interested in giving effectively. If y...
[Linkpost] “Results from an Adversarial Collaboration on AI Risk (FRI)” by Forecasting Research Institute, Jhrosenberg, AvitalM, Molly Hickman, rosehadshar
March 12, 2024 18:40 - 19 minutes - 13.4 MBAuthors of linked report: Josh Rosenberg, Ezra Karger, Avital Morris, Molly Hickman, Rose Hadshar, Zachary Jacobs, Philip Tetlock[1] Today, the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) released “Roots of Disagreement on AI Risk: Exploring the Potential and Pitfalls of Adversarial Collaboration,” which discusses the results of an adversarial collaboration focused on forecasting risks from AI. In this post, we provide a brief overview of the methods, findings, and directions for further resea...
“AI things that are perhaps as important as human-controlled AI (Chi version)” by Chi
March 06, 2024 00:00 - 42 minutes - 28.9 MBTopic of the post: I list potential things to work on other than keeping AI under human control. Motivation The EA community has long been worried about AI safety. Most of the efforts going into AI safety are focused on making sure humans are able to control AI. Regardless of whether we succeed at this, I think there's a lot of additional value on the line. First of all, if we succeed at keeping AI under human control, there are still a lot of things that can go wrong. My perception i...
“This is why we can’t have nice laws” by LewisBollard
February 28, 2024 18:44 - 10 minutes - 7 MBNote: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. How factory farmers block progress — and what we can do about it Most people agree that farmed animals deserve better legal protections: 84% of Europeans, 61-80% of Americans, 70% of Brazilians, 51-66% of Chinese, and 52% of Indians agree with some version of that statement. Yet alm...
“How we started our own EA charity (and why we decided to wrap up)” by KvPelt, Ren Ryba
February 26, 2024 08:28 - 25 minutes - 17.2 MBThis post shares our journey in starting an Effective Altruism (EA) charity/project focused on Mediterranean fish welfare, the challenges we faced, our key learnings, and the reasons behind our decision to conclude the project. Actual research results are published in a Literature review and article. Key points The key points of this post are summarized as follows: We launched a project with the goal of enhancing fish welfare in Mediterranean aquaculture. We chose to limit our proj...
[Linkpost] “‘No-one in my org puts money in their pension’” by tobyj
February 16, 2024 15:04 - 15 minutes - 10.3 MBEpistemic status: the stories here are all as true as possible from memory, but my memory is so so. An AI made this This is going to be big It's late Summer 2017. I am on a walk in the Mendip Hills. It's warm and sunny and the air feels fresh. With me are around 20 other people from the Effective Altruism London community. We’ve travelled west for a retreat to discuss how to help others more effectively with our donations and careers. As we cross cow field after cow field, I get talking ...
[Linkpost] “Social science research we’d like to see on global health and wellbeing [Open Philanthropy]” by Aaron Gertler, Open Philanthropy
February 15, 2024 00:28 - 33 minutes - 23 MBOpen Philanthropy strives to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. To find the best opportunities to help others, we rely heavily on scientific and social scientific research. In some cases, we would find it helpful to have more research in order to evaluate a particular grant or cause area. Below, we’ve listed a set of social scientific questions for which we are actively seeking more evidence.[1] We believe the answers to these questions have the potential to...
[Linkpost] “My cover story in Jacobin on AI capitalism and the x-risk debates” by Garrison
February 12, 2024 23:34 - 10 minutes - 7.34 MBGoogle cofounder Larry Page thinks superintelligent AI is “just the next step in evolution.” In fact, Page, who's worth about $120 billion, has reportedly argued that efforts to prevent AI-driven extinction and protect human consciousness are “speciesist” and “sentimental nonsense.” In July, former Google DeepMind senior scientist Richard Sutton — one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, a major subfield of AI — said that the technology “could displace us from existence,” and that “...
“On being an EA for decades” by Michelle_Hutchinson
February 12, 2024 21:24 - 9 minutes - 6.41 MBA friend sent me on a lovely trip down memory lane last week. She forwarded me an email chain from 12 years ago in which we all pretended we left the EA community, and explained why. We were partly thinking through what might cause us to drift in order that we could do something to make that less likely, and partly joking around. It was a really nice reminder of how uncertain things felt back then, and how far we’ve come. Although the emails hadn’t led us to take any specific actions, al...
“Things to check about a job or internship” by Julia_Wise
February 12, 2024 20:21 - 14 minutes - 10.2 MBA lot of great projects have started in informal ways: a startup in someone's garage, or a scrappy project run by volunteers. Sometimes people jump into these and are happy they did so. But I’ve also seen people caught off-guard by arrangements that weren’t what they expected, especially early in their careers. I’ve been there, when I was a new graduate interning at a religious center that came with room, board, and $200 a month. I remember my horror when my dentist checkup cost most of a...
“My Donations 2023 - Marcus Abramovitch” by MarcusAbramovitch
February 11, 2024 19:35 - 8 minutes - 5.99 MBSummary $8003.98 Charity Entrepreneurship $5000 Insect Institute $5000 Shrimp Welfare Project $5000 Rethink Priorities $5000 Animal Ethics $1000 Wild Animal Initiative Background I think it's good to keep track of and explain donations. It creates a record to get better over time and gives others insights into how you donate. I officially made $45000 in 2023. I earned some investment income from some other sources though this is hard to quantify. I also had some savings f...
[Linkpost] “Sam Altman’s Chip Ambitions Undercut OpenAI’s Safety Strategy” by Garrison
February 10, 2024 19:53 - 6 minutes - 4.59 MBIf you enjoy this, please consider subscribing to my Substack. Sam Altman has said he thinks that developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to human extinction, but OpenAI is trying to build it ASAP. Why? The common story for how AI could overpower humanity involves an “intelligence explosion,” where an AI system becomes smart enough to further improve its capabilities, bootstrapping its way to superintelligence. Even without any kind of recursive self-improvement, som...
“Mathilde Danès (1994-2024)” by Elisa Autric, update
February 08, 2024 23:34 - 2 minutes - 1.42 MBIt is with great sadness that we share with you the passing of our fellow community member and beloved friend Mathilde Danès, at age 29. A dedicated EA, animal advocate, and children's rights supporter, Mathilde had discovered the effective altruism community in 2016-2017, and the farm animal advocacy movement not long after. In 2018, she co-founded a local EA chapter in Lille, where she then lived. Other notable accomplishments of hers, among the many altruistic actions she took, include...
“Tragic Beliefs” by tobytrem
February 08, 2024 17:41 - 8 minutes - 5.52 MBI'm posting this as part of the Forum's Benjamin Lay Day celebration — consider writing a reflection of your own! The “official dates” for this reflection are February 8 - 15 (but you can write about this topic whenever you want). TL;DR: Tragic beliefs are beliefs that make the world seem worse, and give us partial responsibility for it. These are beliefs such as: “insect suffering matters” or “people dying of preventable diseases could be saved by my donations”. Sometimes, to do good...
“Ambitious Impact (AIM) - a new brand for Charity Entrepreneurship and our extended ecosystem!” by CE, Joey
February 08, 2024 17:09 - 6 minutes - 4.45 MBTLDR: Given Charity Entrepreneurship's recent scaling, we are changing our brand to call our extended ecosystem “Ambitious Impact (AIM).” Our new AIM umbrella brand will include the classic CE program as well as recent additional programs connected to grantmaking, research, and effective giving. We are also planning to launch new programs soon. We feel AIM being able to create onramps for other career paths (similar to what we have done for nonprofit entrepreneurship) is the most plausible ...
“Celebrating Benjamin Lay (died on this day 265 years ago)” by Lizka
February 08, 2024 14:33 - 14 minutes - 10 MBQuaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay died exactly 265 years ago today (on February 8, 1759). I’m using the anniversary of his death to reflect on his life and invite you to join me by sharing your thoughts sometime this week. Lay was a radical anti-slavery advocate and an important figure in the Quaker abolitionist movement. He's been described as a moral weirdo; besides viewing slavery as a great sin, he opposed the death penalty, was vegetarian, believed that men and women were equal in the...
“GWWC Pledge featured in new book from Head of TED, Chris Anderson” by Giving What We Can
January 25, 2024 21:34 - 1 minute - 1.28 MBChris Anderson, Head of TED, has just released a new book called Infectious Generosity, which has a whole chapter that encourages readers to take the Giving What We Can Pledge! He has also taken the Giving What We Can Pledge with the new wealth option to give the greater of 10% of income or 2.5% of wealth each year. This inspiring book is a guide to making Infectious Generosity become a global movement to build a hopeful future. Chris offers a playbook for how to embark on our own genero...
“5 possibly impactful career paths for researchers” by CE, Joey
January 23, 2024 20:23 - 10 minutes - 7.28 MBCharity Entrepreneurship is running a second edition of our Research Training Program (RTP) – a program designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions. In this post, we discuss possible long-term career paths for researchers and a gap assessment of what skills people might want to prioritize to pursue those. This discussion may be helpful for people considering the RTP program or those more...
“Rates of Criminality Amongst Giving Pledge Signatories” by Ben_West
January 22, 2024 17:43 - 9 minutes - 6.53 MBI investigate the rates of criminal misconduct amongst people who have taken The Giving Pledge (roughly: ~200 [non-EA] billionaires who have pledged to give most of their money to charity). I find that rates are fairly high: 25% of signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted[1] 4% of signatories have spent at least one day in prison Overall, 41% of signatories have had at least one allegation of substantial misconduct (financial, sexual, or otherwise) ...
“On the abolition of man” by Joe_Carlsmith
January 18, 2024 18:18 - 1 hour - 49.7 MB(Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This essay is part of a series that I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essay can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for brief summaries of the essays that have been released thus far.) Earlier in this series, I discussed a certain kind of concern about the AI alignment discourse – namely, that it aspires to exert an ...
“Report on the Desirability of Science Given New Biotech Risks” by Matt Clancy
January 17, 2024 19:44 - 6 minutes - 4.72 MBShould we seek to make our scientific institutions more effective? On the one hand, rising material prosperity has so far been largely attributable to scientific and technological progress. On the other hand, new scientific capabilities also expand our powers to cause harm. Last year I wrote a report on this issue, “The Returns to Science in the Presence of Technological Risks.” The report focuses specifically on the net social impact of science when we take into account the potential abuse...
“EA Wins 2023” by Shakeel Hashim
January 15, 2024 09:47 - 6 minutes - 4.37 MBCrossposted from Twitter. As the year comes to an end, we want to highlight and celebrate some of the incredible achievements from in and around the effective altruism ecosystem this year. 1. A new malaria vaccine The World Health Organization recommended its second-ever malaria vaccine this year: R21/Matrix-M, designed to protect babies and young children from malaria. The drug's recently concluded Phase III trial, which was co-funded by Open Philanthropy, found that the vaccine was ...
“Survey of 2,778 AI authors: six parts in pictures” by Katja_Grace
January 14, 2024 20:16 - 4 minutes - 3.03 MBCrossposted from AI Impacts blog The 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI is out, this time with 2778 participants from six top AI venues (up from about 700 and two in the 2022 ESPAI), making it probably the biggest ever survey of AI researchers. People answered in October, an eventful fourteen months after the 2022 survey, which had mostly identical questions for comparison. Here is the preprint. And here are six interesting bits in pictures (with figure numbers matching paper, for e...
“Zach Robinson will be CEA’s next CEO” by Ben_West, Eli Rose, ClaireZabel, lincolnq, Michelle_Hutchinson, MaxDalton, Oscar Howie
January 14, 2024 01:32 - 1 minute - 1.25 MBWe, on behalf of the EV US and EV UK boards, are very glad to share that Zach Robinson has been selected as the new CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). We can personally attest to his exceptional leadership, judgement, and dedication from having worked with him at Effective Ventures US. These experiences are part of why we unanimously agreed with the hiring committee's recommendation to offer him the position.[1] We think Zach has the skills and the drive to lead CEA's very im...
“Double the donation: EA inadequacy found?” by Neil Warren
January 13, 2024 17:13 - 2 minutes - 1.83 MBI'm only 30% sure [Edit Jan 7: 90% sure] that this is actually an inadequacy made by those whose job it is to maximize donations but I’ve noticed that none of the donations pages of GiveWell, Giving What We Can, Horizon Institute, or METR have this little tab in them that MIRI has (just scroll down after following the link): This little tool comes from doublethedonation.com. I was looking for charities to donate to, and I’m grateful I stumbled upon the MIRI donation page because otherwi...
“Economic Growth - Donation suggestions and ideas” by DavidNash
January 12, 2024 19:31 - 15 minutes - 10.7 MBThere was a recent post about economic growth & effective altruism by Karthik Tadepalli. He pointed out that a lot of people agree that economic growth is important, but it hasn't really led to many suggestions for specific interventions. I thought it would be good to get the ball rolling[1] by asking a few people what they think are good donation opportunities in this area, or if not, do they think this area is neglected when you have governments, development banks, investors etc all foc...