(crossposted to Lesswrong here.)
Although I have not seen the argument made in any detail or in writing, I and the Future of Life Institute (FLI) have gathered the strong impression that parts of the effective altruism ecosystem are skeptical of the importance of the issue of autonomous weapons systems. This post explains why we think those interested in avoiding catastrophic and existential risk, especially risk stemming from emerging technologies, may want to have this issue higher on their list of concerns.
We will first define some terminology and do some disambiguation, as there are many cl... (Read more)
(thanks to Claire Zabel, Damon Binder, and Carl Shulman for suggesting some of the main arguments here, obviously all flaws are my own; thanks also to Richard Ngo, Greg Lewis, Kevin Liu, and Sidney Hough for helpful conversation and comments.)
Will MacAskill has a post, Are we living at the most influential time in history?, about what he calls the “hinge of history hypothesis” (HoH), which he defines as the claim that “we are living at the most influential time ever.” Whether HoH is true matters a lot for how longtermists should allocate their effort. In his post, Will argues that we should be... (Read more)
I agree with your criticism of my second argument. What I should have instead said is a bit different. There are actions whose value decreases over time. For instance, all else being equal it is better to implement a policy which reduces existential risk sooner rather than later. Patient philanthropy makes sense only if either (a) you expect the growth of your resources to outpace the value lost by failing to act now, or (b) you expect cheaper opportunities to arise in the future. I don't think there are great reasons to believe either of these is true (or... (read more)
Hi everyone,
I'm the Assistant Director at CHAI and as some of you may know, CHAI is currently accepting applications for our 2021 internship program.
Early deadline is 11/23 for applicants who require an earlier response from us. Our normal deadline is 12/13.
You can find more information and the application itself here
Please e-mail me at chai-admin@berkeley.edu if you have any questions!
Part of a series for My Cause Selection 2016. For background, see my writings on cause selection for 2015 and my series on quantitative models.
In my previous essay, I explained why I am prioritizing animal advocacy as a cause area. In this essay, I decide where to donate. I share some general considerations, briefly discuss some promising organizations I did not prioritize, and then list my top candidates for donation and explain why I considered them. I conclude with a final decision about where to donate.
This year, I plan on donating $20,000 to the Good Food Institute (GFI), wh
... (Read more)Supermeat (cultured chicken producer) in Israel now has a test kitchen open to the public, but they have not started charging yet and it appears that they may need to scale up production somewhat before regularly serving cultured animal tissue.
I now think it's more likely than not that you'll win the bet, but it looks like it'll be fairly close.
Wave is a startup building mobile money—a way for people in developing countries to access financial services like savings and money transfer if they can't afford, or live too far away from, traditional banks. Lincoln is co-founder and head of product; Ben is an early engineer and CTO. We've both been part of the EA community since ~2011 (in fact, we met through NYC EA), and work on Wave for EA reasons.
EDIT: this originally said we'd start answering on Friday, but we're getting nerd sniped by the questions so will probably get to them sooner :)
Wave is a spinoff of Sendwave, an app fo... (Read more)
Thanks Ben. I like this answer, but I feel like every time I have seen people attempt to implement it they still end up facing a trade-off.
Consider moving someone from role r1 to role r2. I think you are saying that the person you choose for r2 should be the person you expect to be best at it, which will often be people who aren't particularly good at r1.
This seems fine, except that r2 might be more desirable than r1. So now a) the people who are good at r1 feel upset that someone who was objectively performing worse than them got a more desirable p... (read more)
We’re excited to announce the launch of Probably Good, a new organization that provides career guidance intended to help people do as much good as possible.
For a while, we have felt that there was a need for a more generalist careers organization than 80,000 Hours — one which is more agnostic regarding different cause areas and might provide a different entry point into the community to people who aren’t a good fit for 80K’s priority areas. Following 80,000 Hours’ post about what they view as gaps in the careers space, we contacted them about how a new organization could effectively fil... (Read more)
I can imagine you stopping yourself from doing too much coaching, but the people who apply for coaching don't know what happened or why you didn't get in touch. Does that make sense?
Something as simple as having an automatic reply to email enquiries saying "unfortunately we can't respond to every request for coaching" could be helpful.
"There is a common tendency among effective altruists to think of animal advocacy as having little value for improving the long-term future. Similarly, animal advocates often assume that longtermism has little relevance to their work. Yet this seems misguided: sufficient concern for nonhuman sentient beings is a key ingredient in how well the long-term future will go.
In this post, I will discuss whether animal advocacy – or, more generally, expanding the moral circle – should be a priority for longtermists, and outline implications of a longtermist perspective on animal advocacy. My starting p... (Read more)
In this talk, Jamie Harris, a co-founder of Animal Advocacy Careers and a researcher at the Sentience Institute, introduces some key concepts involved in planning your career so that you can maximize your impact for animals.
We’ve lightly edited Jamie’s talk for clarity. You can also watch it on YouTube and read it on effectivealtruism.org.
Hello, and welcome to this effective animal advocacy careers workshop. Thank you very much for joining me, and thank you to the Centre for Effective Altruism and everybody involved with EAGx Virtual for inviting me to talk.
My name is Jamie Harris. I'm... (Read more)
Differences in the intensity of valenced experience across species may affect the proportion of resources we ought to allocate to helping different types of animals. I recently wrote a long report on this topic. (You can view a PDF of the report here.[1]) In this summary, I attempt to more succinctly convey my main conclusions.
We all know that some experiences feel good, while other experiences feel bad. In the jargon, we can say that experiences often take on a valence: an overall positive or negative flavor. We also know that some good experiences feel better than others,... (Read more)
This post outlines some incentive problems with forecasting tournaments, such as Good Judgement Open, CSET, or Metaculus. These incentive problems may be problematic not only because unhinged actors might exploit them, but also because of mechanisms such as those outlined in Unconscious Economics. For a similar post about PredictIt, a prediction market in the US, see here. This post was written in collaboration with Nuño Sempere, who should be added as a coauthor soon. This is a crosspost from LessWrong.
Discrete prizes distort forecasts
If a forecasting tournament offers a prize to the ... (Read more)
I enjoyed this tweetstorm when you mentioned it to me and should have highlighted it in the article as useful further reading, thanks for posting it!
The following is a condensed version of Faunalytics’ original study, which can be read in full (including a summary and key takeaways) here.
Animals used for food generally receive significantly less attention and funding than companion animals (Faunalytics, 2019). Small-bodied animals like chickens and fish are killed in particularly massive numbers—there are over 12 times more chickens killed each year than cows, and over 3,000 times more fish killed than cows (Faunalytics, 2020; Sentient Media, 2018; The Economist, 2011).
The current study was created to help answer importan... (Read more)
If you would like to share the EA Survey with others, please share this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EAS2020Share
The survey will close on the 10th of December at midnight GMT.
-
What is the EA Survey?
The EA Survey provides valuable information about the demographics of the EA community, how people get involved, how they donate, what causes they prioritise, their experiences of EA, and more.
The estimated average completion time for the main section of this year’s survey is 20 m... (Read more)
I am trying to decide where to donate this year. I am mostly interested in funding cause prioritisation research. I am not sure how best to evaluate the EA research organisations that are out there. As someone who is at the frontline of trying to turn EA ideas into policy change I have my own thoughts on what research I have found most useful (will share in the answers section below). And so I thought it might be useful to ask others for their views on which research is most used.
So curious to know:
Note: For the sake of simpli... (Read more)
What I use research for: I advocate for Future Generations policy within the UK Parliament. This involves using cause priotisation research to decide where to focus my time and attention and using research on policy and governance to decide what to advocate for.
Most useful:
Cause area: Animal Welfare
Primary author: Vicky Cox
Review: Karolina Sarek & Erik Hausen
Research period: 2020
Download PDF
If you are interested in founding a charity based on this idea, contact us at: karolina@charityscience.com
Before opening the report, we think it is important to introduce our research process. Knowing the principles of the process helps readers understand how we formed our conclusions and enables greater reasoning transparency. It will also clarify the structure of the report.
Our research process incorporates elements that are well established ... (Read more)
As an outsider to the field, is there a quick 3-sentence pitch as to why farmed shrimp welfare is specifically important (as opposed to any other farmed animal?) I skimmed through the report for this info but may well have missed it.
My quick read of welfare points is that it's a per-animal metric - did I get that right? If so I'm somewhat hesitant to equate the wellbeing of one eg cow to one shrimp.
I’m a non-profit entrepreneur in effective altruism. Over four years, I collaborated with charity staff and local organisers to offer services in niches that help us do more good.
Grantmakers made six grants to services I ran. Six EAs kindly transferred one-off donations for me to meet my rent. They gave me the opportunity to form community-building teams in effective altruism and AI safety, organise productive conferences and research retreats, and develop online tools and guides (see below).
Funders hesitated though to cover more than basic operational costs at the start of a new service; or a... (Read more)
Got it!
My research team and I are working on a research project designed to promote effective giving.
We hypothesize that participants will be more likely to engage in effective giving (e.g., donate to GiveWell-endorsed charities) if they reflect on the ways in which effective giving is congruent with their values & beliefs.
As part of this project, we are trying to identify EA-related beliefs that are widely held. We’re going to be targeting university students and online workers (the vast majority of whom have never heard of EA).
I’m including a few of the statements ... (Read more)
Some of the items about it being generally good/productive to help people felt redundant -- not sure whether that's an issue for your research.
- I think everyone deserves equal access to opportunity
- Fairness is very important to me
- I think everyone should have access to basic necessities, like food and water
This cluster of items could be seen as somewhat political (especially "equal access to opportunity"). I think they may not be as universal as you'd think (though when presented in a non-political situation, they might not bother even people who nominally di... (read more)
I'm looking at different career choices and in particular, academic research projects. I've tried to compare their impact by using some Fermi calculations, including working out:
My calculations seem like they could be easily out by a couple of orders of magnitude. And it makes a difference--one less order of magnitude and the project is not more than the value of my marginal caree... (Read more)
This makes me think of the contrast between systems analysis and net assessment/strategy. Yes, Fermi calculations are a valuable input into the discussion, but the nature of the problem is likely too complex to give sole weight to that calculation (in most circumstances - I think your example of comparing different research papers is a relatively simple/constrained environment).
In net assessment/strategy, the nature of the choice and your assessment of that nature determine the best methods of analysis. In systems analysis, a one-size-f... (read more)
For my birthday earlier this year, I spent a fair amount of time writing an EA-themed birthday post (reproduced at the bottom of this write-up). I think that this post did fairly well - 5 messages and subsequent calls about career plan changes (!), and 170 reactions on Facebook. As such, I'd be excited for more EAs to make similar posts, especially other highly involved university organizers with experience communicating about EA. In this post I share my thought-process for making this birthday post, what I could’ve done differently, some considerations for other EAs interested in doing the sa... (Read more)
Haven't thought about this enough to leave a helpful note but funnily enough, my birthday is this week & I will definitely be imitating you! What a great idea; I really need to start using social media more as a platform for EA.
I wanted to share this article about an independent research effort led by my IGDORE colleague Michelle King-Okoye, who is aiming to improve healthcare outcomes for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) population COVID patients in developed countries. While I wouldn't say that the project ranks highly against other EA-aligned healthcare work, the qualitative assessment of BAME COVID patient treatment outcomes does seem at least seem neglected when compared to the rest of the COVID response in developed countries.
I'm also quite impressed this has gotten so far as a grass-roots res... (Read more)
A new update on this project - it has now grown into the Ethnicity and COVID-19 Research Consortium (ECRC). They have started to publish some work, which is available here, and Michelle and her colleagues are still looking for BAME people who have been affected to participate in their study here.
The consortia will also be presenting some initial results of their work in an online mini-conference on November 27th (7PM GMT). Please register here to attend.
It seems like this issue is now receiving more attention as well, as the Biden-Harris COVID-19 res... (read more)
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Thanks for writing this up!!
I'm aware of two skeptical posts on EA Forum (by the same person). I just made a tag Autonomous Weapons where you'll find them.