I think that such an obviously fraught and tense issue deserves more thought and care than a quick BOTEC.

I am opposed to adding more barriers to doing BOTECs, they're already difficult enough and rare enough as it is. I appreciate that OP did a BOTEC.

I spent some time looking into this since it was not obvious to me how to buy from Perfect Day. Looks like the only retail partner who sells their whey protein powder is Myprotein, most retailers sell things like ice cream.

Isn't it one of the cheapest forms of protein?

But these should be matched by looking for cases where something good happened because people tried to accumulate power/influence within a system.

I think this is a significant percent of all good things that have ever happened.

I think you are right about this, you've changed my mind (toward greater uncertainty).

My gut feeling is that [...] the biggest difference between good outcomes and bad outcomes is how much work the big AI labs put into alignment during the middle of the intelligence explosion when progress moves fastest.

This seems to depend on a conjunction of several strong assumptions: (1) AI alignment is basically easy; (2) there will be a slow takeoff; (3) the people running AI companies are open to persuasion, and "make AI safety seem cool" is the best kind of persuasion.

But then again I don't think pause protests are going to work, I'm just trying to pick whichever bad plan seems the least bad.

A time cost of 0.0417 $/d for 7.5 s/d and 20 $/h.

Nitpick: I just timed myself taking creatine and it took me 42 seconds.

(My process consists of: take creatine and glass out of cabinet; scoop creatine into glass; pour tap water into glass; drink glass; put creatine and glass back into cabinet.)

Agreed that creatine passes a cost-benefit analysis.

I think this is the best explanation I've seen, it sounds likely to be correct.

That sounds pretty reasonable for why psychotherapy wouldn't be as widespread as it should. It looks to me like most of these reasons wouldn't apply to AMF. Training new psychotherapists takes years and tens of thousands of dollars (at developing-world wages). Getting more malaria nets requires buying more $5 malaria nets, and distributing malaria nets is much easier than distributing psychotherapists. So reasons 1–3 and #6 don't carry over (or at least not to nearly the same extent). #4 doesn't seem relevant to my original question so I think #5 is the only one that carries over—recipients might not know that they should be concerned about malaria.

Why does distributing malaria nets work? Why hasn't everyone bought a bednet already?

• If it's because they can't afford bednets, why don't more GiveDirectly recipients buy them?
• Is it because nobody in the local area sells bednets? If so, why doesn't anyone sell them?
• Is it because people don't think bednets are worth it? If so, why do they use the bednets when given them for free?

I don't know why (I thought it was a good post) but I have some guesses:

1. Maybe people don't like the framing of o1 as "lying" when it's not clear that it lied. All that's clear is that o1 gave a false justification, which isn't necessarily lying.
2. You tend to write in an alarmist rhetorical style that I think turns off a lot of people. I think you are very much correct to be alarmed about AI x-risk, but also I don't think it's a good persuasive strategy (for an EA/rationalist audience) to convey this through emotionally charged rhetoric. I didn't think this particular post was alarmist, but you have a history of writing alarmist posts/comments, so maybe people downvoted based on the title.

• $100 million/year and 600 people = $167,000 per person-year
• $1M buys 10 person-years = $100,000 per person-year

These numbers are approximately the same. I don't understand how you get that 5/6 of the work comes from volunteering / voluntary underpayment, did I do it wrong?