Why I care so much about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in EA.

A more personal reason for me caring about DEI. I know at least a couple of other EAs feel the same way so might be worth having our perspectives out there. Much less about the “business case” for DEI and more about how I feel uncomfortable with the current DEI status in EA and to be a part of the movement I “have to” make the case for DEI.

I’m a normie, and I think I can be an EA too

I often feel that many EAs are a bit more extreme than me. In fact, I feel pretty normal compared to the vibe I get from e.g. reading the EA Forum. Perhaps just stating all the ways in which I am normal could help other people who feel like they do not belong because they are too normal. Helping them feel like EA is a place for them too.

Post about how EA should be marketed more as the natural step forward from our beliefs regarding equality. Everyone's pains, dreams, and simple joys matter. This is true regardless of where or when you live, or even what species you are.

I think talking about cause neutrality, scout mindset, and the long term future is less of a natural introduction point. The idea of equality resonates pretty well with people. The implications of this might be a bit difficult to unpack as well (basically subjective experiences having the same terminal value wherever they transpire), but the basic notion comes from something pretty intuitive and uncontroversial.

Demographics “EA employees” vs EA community

A post just comparing quickly based on the largest EA orgs makeup in terms of race and gender to published results for overall movement. Might indicate that the talent we seek and is likely to get is more diverse than our larger movement indicates. This might imply to a larger degree taking into account their views (e.g. first listening to their asks and then implementing them).

(I hope it is ok that I make an answer for each post I am thinking about writing so I know which posts, if any, people are interested in seeing)

Another post which I might work on for draft amnesty is a response to Julia Wise's you can have more than one goal, and that's fine, and Susan Wolf's Moral Saints. 
I'm less sure about finishing this one because it outlines a problem more than it raises a solution. Specifically, the problem is that:

• Moral reasoning (especially consequentialist reasoning) can't limit itself. Even if you have to take breaks from doing good in order to do more good, you're taking that break because it helps you do more good. 
• Consequentialist reasoning doesn't permit valuing (other) ends for themselves (in a way that you wouldn't impartially maximise). 
• But (and this is Wolf's point and to a lesser extent Julia's), a good life contains values which are non-moral. 

The essay is mostly me struggling with trying to ground the kind of advice which Julia gives, i.e. to limit your pursuit of impartial good to one section of your life. 

Things we often tell people considering pivoting into biosecurity work

This will probably be a collaborative giving-advice-to-newcomers style post

Preliminary outline:

1. Intro
   1. Write something if you repeat it a lot
   2. Biosecurity vs. scope-sensitive ‘EA’ biosecurity
2. There are good opportunities for learning, getting started, and testing your fit.
   1. Compared to 5 years ago, we have solid options for getting up to speed
   2. (Meta) readings lists, newsletters, courses, research programs
3. EA-specific mentoring and orgs are sparse
   1. Not many orgs, not a ton of growth
      1. There is a shortage of organizations that can absorb talent
         1. Need for more orgs in the future
         2. Good to have more founder type people 
   2. a lot of high-level strategic work (roadmapping, blueprinting) to figure out priorities and gaps in existing academic/industry research
   3. Mentoring is really bottlenecked
4. Free yourself from the ‘EA’-label / A lot of important work happens outside of EA
   1. But don’t despair! There are many places to do important work!
   2. Biosec interventions have a pretty solid causal chain
   3. And many scope-sensitive biosec-promising interventions (path. Agnostic etc.pp.) have lots of overlap with public health or One Health focussed biosec.
   4. A lot of important stuff outside of EA, esp. When it comes to actually implementing stuff
      1. Examples
   5. Very valuable to get additional marginal scope-sensitive thinking in traditional settings
   6. Become an expert in something “boring”
      1. Link ASB thing and say it also applies to technical stuff, not only policy work
5. Yes, you can most likely contribute [so be agentic]
   1. Biosec is highly interdisciplinary
   2. points about taking initiative and being agentic.
      1. Kind of a call to action toward the end of the post
   3. Plenty of open questions for a number of backgrounds
      1. You def don't need a biomedical background (that seems to be a common misconception)
      2. Link to Will’s post about biosecurity needs engineers 
      3. Examples
6. (Conclusion)
   1. Reach out, etc. Maybe just a closing sentence

I have a few ideas mulling in my head that I'm yet to decide if it would be useful. I'm unsure about posting them as not sure how popular the 'listicle' format would be as opposed to my normally very long and detailed posts/comments. These are:

Title: Top 5 Lessons Working in Frontline AI Governance
Summary: Things I've picked up regarding AI, risk, harms etc working in-industry in an AI governance role. Might end up being 10 things. Or 3. Depending how it goes.

Title: Top 5 Tips for Early Careers AI Governance Researchers
Summary: Similar to the above, things I wish I had known when I was an ECR.

Title: Why non-AGI/ASI systems pose the greatest longterm risks
Summary: Using a comparison to other technologies, some of my ideas as to why more 'normal' AI systems will always carry more risk and capacity for harm, and why EA's focus on 'super-AI' is potentially missing the wood for the trees.

Title: 5 Examples of Low-Hanging Policy Fruit to Reduce AI Risk
Summary: Again, a similar listicle-style of good research areas or angles that would be impactful 'wins' compared to the resources invested.

Cost-Effectiveness Estimations in Animal Advocacy are Very Contingent on Future Expectations

Although most EAs try to make cost-effectiveness estimations based on "number of animals impacted" or "amount of suffering spared", overwhelming majority of the expected value of animal advocacy efforts depends on their long term effect. 

I will try to show how these estimations have a lot of variance based on different assumptions - which explains the multiple viewpoints in animal advocacy.

I will also try to provide some pros and cons for each approach and try to reveal their assumptions that support their cost-effectiveness claims for the future. 

Preliminary outline (draft):

Intro
 a. Cost-effectiveness estimates between different interventions differ by a lot based on different assumptions. Some interventions can be claimed to be x100000000 more cost-effective than others (I don't agree with Brian Tomasik here). So making the right choices matter a lot. 
 b.  They heavily depend on expectations about the future. (For example: will there be a vegan awakening or will there be a wave of (moral) animal welfare reforms or will there be technological progress that will provide price-, taste-, convenience- competitive PBMs? etc.)
c. Cost-effectiveness estimates in animal advocacy are different from global health and development.
d. Cost-effectiveness claims of different interventions in animal advocacy are typically in conflict with  the cost-effectiveness claims of other interventions since they depend on conflicting assumptions - which partly explain the infighting and debates within the movement.  And since these cost-effectiveness estimates involve expectations about the future, these debates are hard to resolve.   

Then I will try to describe some of the assumptions behind the cost-effectiveness claims of different interventions and provide some pros and cons that support or refute these assumptions. 

1. Radical change
      1.1. Radical moral change by "the commons": (Examples: Mass media and education campaigns - New Roots Institute, Netflix documentaries, mass veg*n leafleting campaigns, best-seller books, Ted Talks, Veganuary...)
      1.2. Radical moral change by "the elites": (Examples: Community building in leading universities, Animal Law programs in law schools, "academic" publications, lobby groups...)      
       1.3. Radical change via technological progress (Good Food Institute, New Harvest, Material Innovation Initiative, Impossible, Beyond..., considerations related to the rise of AI)
      1.4. Radical change due to environmental necessity  

2. Reforms
    2.1. Moral reforms (Chicken welfare campaigns, The Humane League - Open Wing Alliance: Mercy for Animals, L214, OBA, Essere Animali, Animal Equality, Sinergia Animal, Kafessiz Türkiye...)
    2.2. Efficiency reforms (Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project, Future For Fish)
    2.3. Technological reforms (Innovation Animal Ag)
    2.4. Reforms as a path to radical change? (Or radical change efforts as a way to cash in reforms)

3. Should we expect the radical change or reforms to make significant progress in a single country or region at first and have a "spreading effect" afterwards? 
     3.1. Are small yet socially favorable countries really important if they will become the first examples of animal liberation?(Switzerland - Sentience für Tiere, Germany - Albert Schweitzer Stiftung, Singapore, Israel - GFI)
      3.2. Are certain regions really important if they will become the first examples of animal liberation that will move other countries towards its vision? (EU policy - Compassion in World Farming, as well as THL and MFA in the US)
    3.3. If these are not going to happen, then should we just simply look at where most animals live and where organisations can run cheaper than in developed countries?  (Developing countries: Sinergia Animal , Kafessiz Türkiye, Fish Welfare Initiative...)

3. Wild animal welfare
    3.1.  Moral change (Animal Ethics)
     3.2. "Management reforms"(Wild Animal Initiative welfare science research)

4. Contingency due to individual advocates and advocacy groups 

5. Diversified portfolios or worldview diversification as sub-optimal and unrealistic solutions --> the need for concentration and making some bets in favor of some viewpoints 
 

I have quite a few ideas for "heretical" articles going against the grain on EA/rationalism/Ai-risk. Here's a few you can look forward to, although I'll be working slowly. 

A list of unlikely ways that EA could destroy humanity

How motivation gaps explain the disparity in critique quality between pro-anti x-risk people

Why I don't like single number P(doom estimates)

The flaws with AI risk expert surveys

Why drexler-style nanotech will probably never beat biological nanomachines in our lifetimes (even with AI)

Why the singularity will probably be disappointing

There are very few ways to reliably destroy humanity

Why AGI "boxing" is probably possible and useful

How to make AI "warning shots" more likely

Why I don't like the "Many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics

Why "the sequences" are overrated

Why Science beats Rationalism

Why I hate Singer's drowning child parable. 

(comment version here)

A post on how EA research differs from academic research, why people who like one distrust the other, and how in the longterm academic research may be more impactful.

As always, my Forum-posting 'reach' exceeds my time-available 'grasp', so here are some general ideas I have floating around in various states of scribbles, notes, google doc drafts etc, but please don't view them as in any way finalised or a promise to write-up fully:

- AI Risk from a Moderate's Perspective: Over the last year my AI risk vibe^[1] has gone down, probably lower than many other EAs who work with this area. However, I'm also more concerned about it than many other people (especially people who think most of EA is good but AI risk is bonkers). I think my intuitions and beliefs make sense, but I'd like to write them down fully, answer potential criticisms, and identify cruxes at some point.

- Who holds EA's Mandate of Heaven: Trying to look at the post-FTX landscape of EA, especially amongst the leadership, through a 'Mandate of Heaven' lens. Essentially, various parts of EA leaderships have lost the 'right to be deferred to',^[2] but while some of this previous leadership/community emphasis has taken a step back, nothing has stepped in to fill the legitimacy vacuum. This post would look at potential candidates, and whether the movement needs something like this at all.

- A Pluralist Vision for 'Third Wave' EA: Ben's post has been in my mind for a long time. I don't at all claim to have to full answer to this, but I think some form of pluralism that counteracts latent totalism in EA may be a good thing. I think I'd personally tie this to proposals for EA democratisation, but I don't want to make that a load-bearing part of the piece.

- An Ideological Genealogy of e/acc: I've watched the rise of e/acc with a mixture of bewilderment, amusement, and alarm over the last year-and-a-half. It seems like a new ideology for a new age, but as Keynes said "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." I have some academic scribblers in mind, so it would be interesting to see if anything coherent comes out of it.

- EA EDA, Full 2023 Edition: Thanks to cribbing the work of other Forum users, I have metadata for (almost) every EA Forum post and comment, along with tag data, that was published in 2023. I've mostly got it cleaned up, but need to structure it into a readable product that tells us something interesting about the state of EA in 2023, rather than just chuck lots of graphs at the viewer.

- Kicking the Tires on 'Status': The LessWrong community and broader rationalist diaspora use the term 'status' a lot to explain the world (this activity is low/high status, this person is doing this activity to gain high status etc.), and yet I've almost never seen anyone define what this actually means, or compare it to alternative explanations. I think one of the primary LW posts grounds it in a book about improv theatre? So I might do I deep dive on it taking an eliminativism/deflationary stance on status and proposing a more idea-focused paradigm for understanding social behaviour.^[3]

Finally, updates to the Criticism of EA Criticism sequence will continue intermittently so long as bad criticisms continue or until my will finally breaks.

1. ^{^}

   I don't like the term p(doom)

2. ^{^}

   If such a right ever existed in the first place, maybe the right to be trusted/benefit-of-the-doubt would be more accurate

3. ^{^}

   That is, instead of people acting in such-and-such a way so as to regulate/improve their social status, they act in the way do they do because they believe it is the right thing to do, based on their empirical and moral beliefs. Since 'status' isn't really needed to explain the latter imho, we can essentially discard it

Thanks for this, I had a couple of things listed out. This looks like a nice way to prioritise them. I will list some ideas here.

EA is not special, nor should we make it

I recently explained EA to a close friend. His response was "but does not everybody do that already?" I think he is not alone in thinking that generally, EA is common-sense. And if that is true, argue that we should make EA as mainstream as possible.

I'm considering writing about my personal journey to working on wild animal welfare, which was unusually pinbally: loving animals --> learning survival skills and slaughtering a bunch of poultry --> interested in things like rewilding --> working to end factory farming --> working on wild animal welfare at Wild Animal Initiative.

People often find this story interesting when I tell it, and it might help engage or persuade some people (e.g. by demonstrating that I've seriously considered other philosophies toward nature).

But my big hangup is I don't really know who the audience for this piece would be, or what exactly I want to achieve with it. That could have a big effect on which arguments I make, what kind of language I use, and how much detail I go into. (Having an altruistic theory of change is also essential to feeling okay with spending this much time gazing into my navel.)

I'd welcome any thoughts on whether/how to proceed!

A vision for wild animal welfare - lab-grown meat, population control via contraceptives - what successful wild animal welfare interventions could look like, hundreds of years from now

Against deference in EA, and problems with inteprreting consensus in fields where deference is common

I'm thinking of ~finishing a draft for draft amnesty that I was writing a while ago about the future of nature. From speaking with conservationists, I got the impression that many were focused on the past (restoring the past, obligations to the long history of evolution etc...) Because of the urgency of their task, I didn't see as much focus on the future. 

The post I am writing goes through a few vignettes of possible futures for the wild, including:

• Suffering abolition. Gene drives to remove sources of suffering, ecosystem design etc...
• Biodiversity maximalism: there are many ways we could increase biodiversity if we wanted to, beyond levels present today or in the past. When people say they care about biodiversity, they don't seem to care about this. This section might be a reductio of those arguments. 
• Extending political categories (self determination, citizenship) to wild animals (as in Zoopolis)
• Covering our tracks: this would be a description of my understanding of the conservationist's focus. 

Why evidence-based giving should be a mass movement (and decouple from EA somewhat)

Tips for effective policy work

(Sorry I don't know how to do formatting very well, so I can't make one of those great big titles others are using here):

-Appendices to: Some Observations on Alcoholism:

Appendix posts are post I write on my blog sometimes like these:

https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/tags/appendices/

which essentially respond to things I now disagree with in the original post, or expand on ideas I didn't get to cover very thoroughly, or just add on relevant ideas that I feel don't deserve their own separate article. This one would be to my recentish article on my struggles with alcoholism:

https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/alcoholism/

It hasn't been all that much time, but lots has happened since then, and since it is one of the most salient things in my life right now, that I think and talk about a huge amount due to my treatment, it is hard not to have takes I want to write out about it. I don't have much yet, but it is most likely to be the piece I post, if anything, for draft amnesty week. I would especially appreciate commentary from people with experience in recovery, and especially with better knowledge than me about addiction to: marijuana, kratom, ketamine, and stimulants. I have drafts for the firs two already, but they are pretty spare, and I don't have anything for the other two yet.

About how to run an EA organization with the intent of it being a part time investment of time. 1-2 days per month with a potential 4-12 day stretch once a year. I had this idea when I talked to Ulrik Horne about how he could slowly start up a biosecurity/bio shelter project.

I think it's a good idea for an organization that can pay for 1-4 full timers and then flex once a month to work on projects together. This is what organizations like the Army Reserves does for building a capability/capacity that is needed but not imminently.

Very personal and unconventional research advice that no-one told me that I would have found helpful in my first 2 years of academic research. What I would change about this advice after taking a break and then starting a PhD.

Why in the policy world, given the current size of the movement, EAs should narrowly focus on foreign policy and science policy 

Urgency in global health - In defence of short-term, band-aid fixes

Why facial recognition tech is an underrated problem 

How to best engage with criticisms of EA, from the perspective of helping the community achieve the goal of doing the most good

A post calling for more exploratory altruism that focuses on discovery costs associated with different potential interventions and the plausible ranges of impact of the associated intervention.

A public list that identified different unexplored, or underexplored, interventions could be really helpful.

I actually thought about this after listening to Spencer Greenberg's podcast- his observation that we shouldn't think about personal interventions, like whether to try a new drug or adopt a habit, in terms of naive expected value, but rather in terms of variance in effect. Even if a drug's average affect on someone is negative, if some people get a large benefit from it, it is worth testing to see if you are someone who benefits from it. If it really helps you, you can exploit it indefinitely, and if it hurts you, you can just stop and limit the bad effect.

Likewise a lot of really good interventions may have low "naive EV"; that is to say, if you were to irrevocably commit to funding it, it would be a poor choice. But the better question is, is this an intervention that could plausibly be high EV and have high room for exploitation?  What are the costs associated with such discovery? With such an intervention, you could pay the discovery costs and exploit if it turns out to be high EV, and cut losses if it does not. It is worth considering that many promising interventions might look like bad bets at the outset, but still be worth discovery costs given the ability to capitalize on lottery winners.

I understand that there are many organizations like CEARCH and Rethink Priorities (and many others) that are involved in cause prioritization research. But I think if one of them, or another org, were to compile a list that focused on search costs and plausible ranges of impact, making this publicly available and easy for the public to convey thoughts and information, this could be a very useful tool to spot promising funding/research/experimentation opportunities.

Summaries of papers on the nature of consciousness (focusing on artificial consciousness in particular).

Comparing agnostic metagenomic sequencing and massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing for clinical disease surveillance and early-warning systems

This will likely be part of my lit review of my master's thesis and should also make an interesting blog post.

I am unsure whether to call it massively parallelised or massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing when you use on the order of 10⁵-10⁶ probes at the same time

What is agnostic metagenomic sequencing? https://doi.org/10.1128/cmr.00119-22

What is massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing? https://doi.org/10.1128/jcm.00612-23 

What are the pros and cons of the different approaches? 

• cost?
• amount of labor needed?
• how quickly do you get results?
• ...

examples of Pros of bait capture sequencing

• “results in two to three orders of magnitude enhancement in sensitivity at a reduced cost” (Kapoor et al. 2023)
• “mitigates Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) concerns because host sequence data are not collected” (Kapoor et al. 2023)

How are these methods different from similar, commercially available products?

(e.g., https://www.twistbioscience.com/products/ngs/fixed-panels/comprehensive-viral-research-panel)

I have been considering writing a somewhat technical post arguing that “large Transformer models are shortcut finders” is a more clarifying abstraction for these sorts of artifacts than considering them to be simulators, shoggoths, utility maximizers, etc. Empirical research on the challenges of out-of-distribution generalization, path dependency in training, lottery tickets/winning subnetworks, training set memorization, and other areas appear to lend credence to this as a more reasonable abstraction.

Beyond allowing for a more accurate conception of their function, I believe seeing Transformer models through this lens naturally leads to another conclusion: that the existential risk posed by AI in the near-term, at least as presented within EA and adjacent communities, is likely overblown.

Reconciling evidence-based development, foreign aid and international health with decolonisation / local knowledge

The most good you can do is a Schwartz Set.

Basically I think the idea is that because of inevitable uncertainty, there will be multiple activists/option/donations that may all be considered “the best”, or at least among which it is not possible to draw a comparison.

I think this is true even if all moral outcomes are comparable, but of course if not then it follows that all activities are probably not comparable either.

Ai already kills thousands of children and we are unable to stop it

Talking about lead poisoning etc. from e-waste and how that already kills people and lead to poor health outcomes. Increasingly, e-waste will come from datacentres for AI. Who today can stop these deaths? I think one can argue that nobody can. 

Just fund community health workers - the case for why EA underestimates the cost-effectiveness

The case for supporting Gulf-style immigration policy in the West

Why impartiality in conseuqentialist moral systems does not contradict virtue ethics or deontology, and in fact logically follows from both the virtue of selflessness and the principle of treating people equally

A post explaining what I take to be the best reply to Thorstad's skeptical paper On the Singularity Hypothesis.