Executive summary: The author is requesting support from the Effective Altruism (EA) community to fund a grain processing facility in Uganda that would help rural farmers diversify crops, reduce poverty, and improve food security in the region.

Key points:

1. The Busoga region in Uganda is overly dependent on sugarcane, leading to increased hunger and poverty. The author's project aims to promote alternative crops like sorghum, maize, and cassava.
2. The proposed grain facility would create new market linkages for farmers, reduce post-harvest losses, and enable access to large institutional buyers.
3. The crops would be used for food aid, animal feed, and beer production, but are not expected to significantly increase local alcohol production or lower prices.
4. There is strong local support and need for agro-processing facilities to help farmers diversify incomes. Similar projects have successfully lifted thousands of households out of poverty.
5. The £339,403 facility could potentially benefit 9,000-165,000 households, providing a sustainable income stream to escape poverty and independently address issues like malaria.
6. The author is requesting the EA community to collaborate closely to make this transformative project a reality.

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Executive summary: Manifund ran several impact certificate programs in Q1 2023 with mixed results, and is exploring new directions like regranting and prize challenges to find product-market fit for funding awesome projects.

Key points:

1. Manifund ran impact certificate programs for ACX Grants, the Manifold Community Fund, and a Chinatalk essay competition in Q1.
2. The ACX Grants impact market had lower investor participation than hoped, but a micro-regranting program engaging individual donors was successful.
3. The Manifold Community Fund tested some impact market changes, but most did not seem worth keeping; great projects emerged but didn't require upfront funding.
4. The Chinatalk essay competition partnership achieved mixed results in engaging investors and generating concrete, market-ready predictions.
5. For Q2, Manifund is exploring initiatives like the Manifest festival, AI safety regranting, prize challenges, fiscal sponsorship, and collaborations to find promising directions.
6. Manifund is interested in connecting with creators, grantees, donors, and others to scale their work enabling awesome projects.

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Executive summary: The post presents evidence that Émile P. Torres has engaged in a pattern of dishonesty, harassment, stalking, and sockpuppetry in their interactions with the effective altruism community and others.

Key points:

1. Torres harassed and stalked Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, including making racist comments about Boghossian's daughter.
2. Torres made demonstrably false claims, such as being "forcibly removed" from a paper collaboration and misrepresenting their affiliation with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).
3. Torres grossly distorted the views of several people, including Hilary Greaves, Andreas Mogensen, Nick Beckstead, Tyler Cowen, and Olle Häggström, to portray them and the longtermist philosophy as "white supremacist".
4. Torres created fake accounts, including the "Alex Williams" sockpuppet, to evade bans, harass targets, and discredit opponents.
5. When confronted with their misrepresentations, Torres either refused to issue corrections or briefly acknowledged mistakes before continuing the same behavior.

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Executive summary: The intentional stance, which ascribes beliefs, desires, and goals to an entity based on its behavior, is the most useful framework for understanding and interacting with large language models (LLMs) given their human-level performance on various tasks.

Key points:

1. LLMs are best understood through the intentional stance rather than the design or physical stance, as their outputs are indistinguishable from humans on many tasks.
2. LLMs can be said to have "beliefs" based on their training data, "desires" related to their prompts and survival, and "goals" contingent on their assigned tasks.
3. Examples of LLM human-level performance include passing the bar exam, poetry writing, and theory of mind interactions.
4. The intentional stance has facilitated quantitative measurement of LLM capabilities, highlighted the uniqueness of the deep learning paradigm, and broadened the range of experimentation.
5. Modeling LLMs as intentional systems calls for a deflationary approach to cognition focused on observable behavior.
6. The cognitive capabilities of LLMs necessitate the use of mental vocabulary and the intentional stance framework.

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Executive summary: Poverty in the U.S. causes significant suffering and death, but the social safety net is ineffective due to bureaucratic burden and restrictions; evidence suggests more accessible cash-based programs could reduce poverty and save lives.

Key points:

1. Poverty in the U.S. is associated with a high number of deaths each year, more than homicides, firearms, suicide, and drug overdoses.
2. The U.S. has a higher child mortality rate and poverty rate compared to other wealthy countries, despite above-average social spending.
3. U.S. social programs are less effective due to bureaucratic burden, restrictions, and low utilization rates.
4. Evidence from cash-based programs, like pandemic-era stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit, shows they can significantly reduce poverty and improve well-being.
5. GiveDirectly aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of high-quality cash programs to influence government spending and policy.
6. The Effective Altruism community should evaluate and recommend U.S. causes to expand its impact and influence a larger portion of domestic charitable giving.

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Executive summary: The term "open source AI" is frequently misused by companies to gain positive perception without meeting the actual criteria for open source, which hinders meaningful discussion about AI governance and regulation.

Key points:

1. Open source software is clearly defined, but current AI models don't fit neatly into this definition due to their unique components (architecture, training process, weights).
2. The Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) is still being developed, so there is no formal definition of "open source AI" yet.
3. Many prominent AI models (GPT-4, Llama3, Gemma, Mistral, BLOOMZ) claim to be open source but do not meet the criteria, while only a few (Amber, Crystal, OpenELM) can be considered truly open source.
4. Companies misuse the "open source" label for PR benefits and to lobby for reduced regulations without sacrificing their competitive advantage.
5. To clarify the space, the author proposes categorizing models as Open Source (per OSAID), Shared Weights (released weights only), Open Release (encompasses both previous categories), and Closed Source.

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Executive summary: The UK government's proposed mandatory animal welfare labelling scheme for meat products is a promising step that could significantly improve farm animal welfare, and the public consultation is an important opportunity to influence the policy.

Key points:

1. The proposed scheme would require labelling of chicken, eggs, and pork products sold in UK retailers based on the farming methods used, with five tiers of welfare standards.
2. Mandatory labelling could enable consumers to reliably choose higher-welfare products and pressure retailers to stop selling lower-welfare options, as seen with free-range eggs in the UK.
3. Poorly regulated welfare labels can be harmful, but the UK's proposed scheme has provisions for monitoring farms and could meaningfully improve animal welfare.
4. Public consultations can be influential, and signaling expertise in responses may be valuable. Higher response rates supporting the scheme could also help.
5. The consultation closes on May 7th, 2023, and the author provides a template document to help people submit high-quality responses efficiently.

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Executive summary: The author argues that mass protests against AI development are necessary as a backup plan to prevent potential catastrophic risks from future AI systems like GPT-6, given the uncertainty and limitations of current governance and technical solutions.

Key points:

1. GPT-5 training is starting soon, and while catastrophic risks are unlikely, they are hard to predict and mitigate with certainty.
2. Governance efforts and technical solutions for AI alignment may not be sufficient to prevent the development of potentially dangerous AI systems like GPT-6 by 2028.
3. Mass protests against AI are a viable "Plan B" because they require no new ideas or permissions, and most people support pausing AI development without feeling like they are sacrificing anything.
4. Building a small protest movement now through efforts like PauseAI can lay the foundation for a larger, more impactful movement when the general public becomes more aware of AI's imminent effects on society and the economy.

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Executive summary: High sensory processing sensitivity (HSP) is a trait that affects a significant portion of the population, including those in the Effective Altruism (EA) community, impacting their experiences and interactions with the world in profound ways.

Key points:

1. HSPs, or Highly Sensitive Persons, experience the world more intensely, with heightened emotional reactions, deeper processing of sensory input, and a greater appreciation for art and beauty.
2. Sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) involves both a higher density of sensory input and a longer integration time for processing this information, which can lead to both advantages and challenges in personal efficacy and risk of burnout.
3. Key characteristics of HSPs include low sensory threshold, ease of excitation, and aesthetic sensitivity, which contribute to their unique perspectives and experiences.
4. HSPs have several advantages, such as empathy, creativity, depth of processing, sensory intelligence, and depth of emotion, which can be leveraged for personal and professional success.
5. There are notable disadvantages for HSPs, including susceptibility to emotional contagion, boredom, unproductive immersion, sensory overload, and overexcitation, requiring specific coping strategies.
6. Concrete actions for HSPs include modifying their environment, communicating needs effectively, practicing self-compassion, crafting their job to fit their sensitivity, leveraging their strengths, engaging in play, and embracing their sensitivity to find fulfilling roles.
7. The post concludes with personal reflections on the importance of acknowledging and accommodating high sensitivity in oneself and others, encouraging HSPs to find paths that align with their traits for a meaningful and impactful life.

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Executive summary: The author argues that consciousness is a fundamental yet unobservable reality, and that it is likely to grow more than linearly with the complexity of neural networks, a concept referred to as the super additivity of consciousness. This has implications for understanding sentience in animals and considering their moral weight.

Key points:

1. The author proposes that consciousness is a noumenal reality, the most real thing in the universe, but cannot be observed by others.
2. Our understanding of consciousness is limited to our own experiences and those reported by other humans, due to physical similarities and communication.
3. The author criticizes physicalist epiphenomenalism and limitations of scientific understanding regarding consciousness in artificial intelligence and other systems.
4. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is endorsed as the best theory of consciousness, as it acknowledges that theories of consciousness are formalizations of our intuitions.
5. The author suggests that intensity of consciousness is related to complexity and is likely super-additive, growing more than linearly with the number of nodes/connections/speed of neural networks.
6. Moral weights are related to intensity of conscious experience and the author advocates for careful consideration of sentience in animals, especially large vertebrates, when extending the moral circle.

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