Looking for collaboration on progress alignment, or the emulation of human moral progress in frontier AI systems, to prevent premature value lock-in from AI — a neglected existential risk. See our research agenda and recent publication.
I'd also like to reiterate the arguments Larry Temkin gave against international aid, since the post doesn't cover them. I'm not sure if I'm convinced by these arguments, but I do find them reasonable and worth serious consideration.
A counter-argument: Here it is argued that the research supporting the 3.5% figure may not apply to the animal advocacy context.
I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.
I elaborated on this in my shortform. If the suggestion above seems too vague, there're also examples in the shortform. (I plan to coordinate a discussion/brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests; please do PM me if you're interested)
(I was late to the party, but since Nathan encourages late comments, I'm posting my suggestion anyways.)
Suggestion: I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.
I elaborated on this in my shortform. If the suggestion above seems too vague, there're also examples in the shortform. (I plan to coordinate a discussion/brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests; please do PM me if you're interested)
(I was late to the party, but since Nathan encourages late comments, I'm posting my suggestion anyways. I'm posting the comment also under this post besides the previous one, because Nathan said that "maybe add them to both"; please correct me if that's my misunderstanding)
Proposal: I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.
(note: in order to keep the shortform short I tried to be curt when writing the content below; as a result the tone may come out harsher than I intended)
We talk a lot about epistemic health, but have massively underinvested in infrastructure that safeguards epistemic health. While things like EA Forum and EAG and social circles at EA hubs are effective at spreading information and communicating ideas, to my knowledge there has been no systematic attempt at understanding (and subsequently improving) how they affect epistemic health.
Examples of things not-currently-existing that I consider epistemic health infrastructure:
I plan to coordinate a discussion/brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests. Please do PM me if you're interested!
Apologies for posting four shortforms in a row. I accumulated quite a few ideas in recent days, and I poured them all out.
Summary: When exploring/prioritizing causes and interventions, EA might be neglecting alternative future scenarios, especially along dimensions orthogonal to popular EA topics. We may need to consider causes/interventions that specifically target alternative futures, as well as add a "robustness across future worlds" dimension to the ITN framework.
Epistemic status: low confidence
In cause/intervention exploration, evaluation and prioritization, EA might be neglecting alternative future scenarios, e.g.
This is not about pushing for certain futures to realize. Instead, it's about what to do given that future. Therefore, arguments against pushing for certain futures (e.g. low neglectedness) do not apply.
For example, an EA might de-prioritize pushing for future X due to its low neglectedness, but if they think X has a non-trivial probability to realize, and its realization has rich implications for cause/intervention prioritization, then whenever doing prioritization, they need to think about "what I should do in a world where X would be realized". This could mean:
In theory, the consideration of alternative futures should be captured by the ITN framework, but in practice it's usually not. Therefore it could be valuable to add one more dimension to the ITN framework: "robustness across future worlds".
Also, there're different dimensions on which futures can differ. EA tends to have already considered the dimensions that are related to EA topics (e.g. which trajectory of AI is actualized), but tends to ignore the dimensions that aren't. But this is unreasonable, as EA-topic-related dimensions aren't necessarily the dimensions in which futures have the largest variance.
Finally, note that in some future worlds, it's easier to have high altruistic impact than in other worlds. For example in a capitalist world, altruists seem to be at quite a disadvantage to profit-seekers; in some alternative social forms, altruism plausibly becomes much easier and more impactful, while in some other social forms, it may become even harder. In such cases, we may want to prioritize the futures that have the most potential for current altruistic interventions.
Epistemic status: I only spent 10 minutes thinking about this before I started writing.
Idea: Funders may want to pre-commit to awarding whoever accomplished a certain goal. (e.g. maybe some funder like Open Phil can commit to awarding a pool of money to people/orgs who reduce meat consumption to a certain level, and the pool will be split in proportion to contribution)
Detailed considerations:
This can be seen as a version of retroactive funding, but it's special in that the funder makes a pre-commitment.
(I don't know a lot about retroactive funding/impact markets, so please correct me if I'm wrong on the comparisons below)
Compared to other forms of retroactive funding, this leads to the following benefits:
... but also the following detriments:
Compared to classical grant-proposal-based funding mechanisms, this leads to the following benefits:
... but also the following detriments:
Important points:
veganhealth.org
Here's the link!