Since this is turning out to be basically an AMA for LTFF, another question:

How high is the bar for giving out grants to projects trying to increase human intelligence^[1]? Has the LTFF given out grants in the area^[2], and is this something you're looking for?

(A short answer without justification, or a simple yes/no, would be highly appreciated for me to know whether this is a gap I should be trying to fill.)

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1. Or projects trying to create very intelligent animals that can collaborate with and aid humans. ↩︎

2. Looking around in the grants database CSV I didn't find anything obviously relevant. ↩︎

I was curious how the "popularity" of the ITN factors has changed in EA recently. In short: Mentions of "importance" have become slightly more popular, and both "neglectedness" and "tractability" have become slightly less popular, by ~2-6 percentage points.

I don't think this method is strong enough to make conclusions, but it does track my perception of a vibe-shift towards considering importance more than the other two factors.

Searching the EA forum for the words importance/neglectedness/tractability (in quotation marks for exact matches) in the last year yields 454/87/110 (in percentages 69%/13%/17%) results, for important/neglected/tractable it's 1249/311/152 (73%/18%/9%).

When searching for all time the numbers for importance/neglectedness/tractability are 2824/761/858 (in percentages 63%/17%/19%) results, for important/neglected/tractable it's 7956/2002/1129 (71%/18%/10%). I didn't find a way to exclude results from the last year, unfortunately.

Argument in favor of giving to humans:

Factory farming will stop at some point in this century${}_{80\%}$, while human civilization could stay for a much longer time. So you can push humanity in a slightly better long-term direction by improving the circumstances in the third world, e.g. reducing the chance that some countries will want to acquire nuclear weapons for conflict because of wars because of famines.

So there's an option to affect trajectory change by giving to global health, but not really for animal welfare.

The backlink-checker doesn't show anything of the sorts; but I think it doesn't work for discord or big social media websites like 𝕏.

Thanks for the comment! The reasoning looks good, and was thought-provoking.

If I instead go for the best of both worlds, it seems intuitively more likely that I end up with something which is mediocre on both axes - which is a bit better than mediocre on one and irrelevant on the other

I think I disagree with you here. I model being bad at choosing good interventions as randomly sampling from the top n% (e.g. 30%) from the distribution when I'm trying to choose the best thing along the axis of e.g. non-x-risk impact. If this is a good way of thinking about it, then I don't think that things change a lot—because of the concavity of the frontier, things I choose from that set are still going to be quite good from a non-x-risk perspective, and pretty middling from the x-risk perspective.

I am very unsure about this, but I think it might look like in this image:

When you choose from the top 30% on popularity, you get options from the purple box at random, and same for options in the green box for effectiveness.

If you want to push axes, I guess you're going to aim for selecting from the intersection of both boxes, but I'm suspicious you actually can do that, or whether you end up selecting from the union of the boxes instead${}_{60\%}$. Because if you can select from the intersection, you get options that are pretty good along both axes, pretty much by definition.

I could use my code to quantify how good this would be, though a concrete use case might be more illuminating.

Huh, the convergent lines of thought are pretty cool!

Your suggested solution is indeed what I'm also gesturing towards. A "barbell strategy" works best if we only have few dimensions we don't want to make comparable, I think.

(AFAIU It grows only linearly, but we still want to perform some sampling of the top options to avoid the winners curse?)

I think this link is informative: Charitable interventions appear to be (weakly) lognormally distributed in cost-effectiveness. In general, my intuition is that "charities are lognormal, markets are normal", but I don't have a lot of evidence for the second part of the sentence.

My current understanding is that he believes extinction or similar from AI is possible, at 5% probability, but that this is low enough that concerns about stable totalitarianism are slightly more important. Furthermore, he believes that AI alignment is a technical but solvable problem. More here.

I am far more pessimistic than him about extinction from misaligned AI systems, but I think it's quite sensible to try to make money from AI even in worlds from high probability of extinction, since the market signal provided counterfactually moves the market far less than the realizable benefit from being richer in such a crucial time.

Thanks for tagging me! I'll read the post and your comment with care.

Not central to EA, but there's Gwerns open questions.