Effective Altruism Forum Podcast

Open Phil is seeking applications from grantees impacted by recent events by Bastian_Stern

Announcing Nonlinear Emergency Funding by Kat Woods, Emerson Spartz, Drew Spartz

AI Safety Microgrant Round by Chris Leong, Damola Morenikeji, David_Kristoffersson

Up to $2K USD grants, with total available funding of $6K.

Effective Peer Support Network in FTX crisis (Update) by Emily, Inga

Includes a table of supporters you can contact for free, as well as a peer support network slack.

Thoughts on legal concerns surrounding the FTX situation by Molly

Thank you all for listening, you can follow Coleman on Twitter at @SnellColeman for any updates on the EA Forum Weekly and also his interview-based podcast, 21st Talks.

This week's episode is a little different from our normal programing due to front-ending news and discussion about the FTX situation. If you need someone to talk to, even just to vent, CEA’s community health team is available or you can access peer support set up by Rethink Wellbeing and the Mental Health Navigator here. 

Limited emergency funding is available via Nonlinear or the AI Safety Microgrants round

Link to the 2022 EA Survey! 

EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (Oct. 31st - Nov. 6th 22')

The Effective Altruism Forum Weekly is hosted by Coleman Snell and Summaries are written by Zoe Williams of Rethink Priorities. Each week, we summarize the top-voted posts and articles on the EA Forum, conveniently separated into different categories for easier listening.

Link to the 2022 EA Survey! 

EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (24 - 30th Oct 22')

The Effective Altruism Forum Weekly is hosted by Coleman Snell and Summaries are written by Zoe Williams of Rethink Priorities. Each week, we summarize the top-voted posts and articles on the EA Forum, conveniently separated into different categories for easier listening. 

A written version of the summaries can be found here.

1. EA Forum Weekly summaries will keep happening
2. Watch this space; we may return to full readings of EA Forum posts (and maybe comments), with even better production value than a year ago
3. Maybe other content too (authors read own posts, interviews/discussions with authors, etc), contact daaronr AT gmail.com if you are interested in contributing content

Starting with "We can do better than Argmax".

Link: EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (26 Sep - 9 Oct 22') 

Read/adapted from EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (19 - 25 Sep 22') by Zoe Williams (I believe only the EA Forum part is narrated.)

Synthesized/ narrated and produced by Coleman Snell with consultation from David Reinstein.

An experiment eliciting relative estimates for Open Philanthropy’s 2018 AI safety grants

Could it be a (bad) lock-in to replace factory farming with alternative protein?

Differential technology development: preprint on the concept

Announcing the Space Futures Initiative

Requesting feedback: proposal for a new nonprofit with potential to become highly effective

What could an AI-caused existential catastrophe actually look like?

Improving "Improving Institutional Decision-Making": A brief history of IIDM

Roodman's Thoughts on Biological Anchors

Apply now - EAGxVirtual (21-23 Oct)

Announcing an Empirical AI Safety Program

My emotional reaction to the current funding situation

My closing talk at EAGxSingapore

Bring legal cases to me, I will donate 100% of my cut of the fee to a charity of your choice

"Agency" needs nuance

CEA Ops is now EV Ops

EA architect: Building an EA hub in the Great Lakes region, Ohio

It’s not effective to call everything effective and how (not) to name a new organisation

Please note that this podcast will only contain summaries of EA forum posts, and not LessWrong posts. This is to keep the episodes short & sweet for a weekly series. Other options would include raising the karma threshold on both.

"Do good better" Creative Writing Contest Fiction joint 2nd prize winner, by Andrew Kao, read by David Reinstein

Link: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SQZKZe3MLjiAuyxGJ/creative-writing-contest-fiction-do-good-better

3 Jan 2022 -- improved sound quality (less mic distortion, I hope)

Cross-post from Found In the Struce

Reading Seeing the effects of your donation and making incremental choices from the EA Forum, by David Reinstein ... (read by the author)

Part of the 'giving and gifts podcast trilogy'
along with Profusion: The Big, Christmassy Data Special and
FITS "The Economics of the Gift" reading

Original post

Written by Jason Schukraft

Original post by Jonathan Harris

Graph mentioned in episode

Original post

Written by Jason Schukraft

Read content and comments from EA Forum post "Research Summary: The Intensity of Valenced Experience across Species" by Jason Schukraft.
Read by David Reinstein, who interjects with some small discussion points and thoughts.

Cross hosted from "Found in the Struce"

David Reinstein:
I read  "Cultured meat: A comparison of techno-economic analyses I added some comments including a few 'what does this mean?'  cries for help.  Note, I mentioned stray content in one place when it was actually a link to a google doc -- I was reading this on a black and white e-reader that didn't show this as a link. Some highlights: Laugh at my mispronunciation of biological terms, and mixing up the Greek letters upsilon and mu.

Original post by Jai

Read & edited by Garrett Baker

This post is a primarily motivational work on the horrible effects & eradication of smallpox.

Original post by Benjamin Todd

Read & edited by David Reinstein

Here’s a summary of what’s coming up:

• How much funding is committed to effective altruism (going forward)? Around $46 billion.
• How quickly have these funds grown? About 37% per year since 2015, with much of the growth concentrated in 2020–2021.
• How much is being donated each year? Around $420 million, which is just over 1% of committed capital, and has grown maybe about 21% per year since 2015.
• How many committed community members are there? About 7,400, growing 10–20% per year 2018–2020, and growing faster than that 2015–2017.
• Has the funding overhang grown or shrunk? Funding  seems to have grown faster than the number of people, so the overhang  has grown in both proportional and absolute terms.
• What might be the implications for career choice?  Skill bottlenecks have probably increased for people able to think of  ways to spend lots of funding effectively, run big projects, and  evaluate grants.

Podcast originally posted here

Original Effective Altruism Forum post here

Read & Edited by David Reinstein

Reading "Why scientific research is less effective in producing value  than it could be: a mapping" post in the EA Forum (and peering at some  links).  Some comments and thoughts/my own experience.    Reading the comments section, especially comments from Linch Zhang,  IanDavidMoss, and AllAmericanBreakfast.

Outro snip: "Magic Terrapin" by Alfie Pugh, performed by the Locked Horns

I hope to follow up on this with a reading/discussion of  bit.ly/unjournal (or the EA Forum post version of this, if and when I  make it)

This is the second post in the series Improving the EA-Aligned Research Pipeline, What's wrong with the EA-Aligned Research Pipeline.

This reading discusses 10 potential issues with the pipeline as it currently stands. Most notably, it finds that although there are a large number of people, research questions and funders, but a bottleneck in vetting potential EA research candidates.

The first post in this series was:

• Improving the EA-Aligned Research Pipeline

Further posts in this series will be released soon.

Links:

• Original post
• A central directory for open research questions
• EA is vetting-constrained
• Ben Todd discussing organizational capacity, infrastructure, and management bottlenecks
• Call to action anonymous form

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/fSmBYeTyisyM9fkmD/p/ysHq3K2asNwsCRWeG

Read & edited by Sam Nolan

This post is the introduction to the sequence, Improving the EA-Aligned Research Pipeline by MichaelA. The sequence discusses the problems with the current system for EA aligned research, and issues with allocating resources (particularly human resources) effectively. It also discusses possible intervention options to solve these bottlenecks in the research pipeline.

This episode is an introduction to the sequence. The rest of the sequence is:

• What's wrong with the EA Research Pipeline?

The rest of the sequence is, as of writing this, yet to be published, but hopefully will be soon!

The links in this post can be found by browsing the original post above.

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3voXaqvPutSrHvuCT/the-case-against-ea-cause-areas

Read & edited by Garrett Baker

Everyone reasonably familiar with EA knows that AI safety, pandemic  preparedness, animal welfare and global poverty are considered EA cause  areas, whereas feminism, LGBT rights, wildlife conservation and dental  hygiene aren't.

The state of some very specific cause areas being  held in high regard by the EA community is the result of long  deliberations by many thoughtful people who have reasoned that work in  these areas could be highly effective. This collective cause  prioritization is often the outcome of weighing and comparing the scale, tractability and neglectedness of different causes. Neglectedness in particular seems to play a  crucial role in swaying the attention of many EAs and concluding, for  example, that working on pandemic preparedness is likely more promising  than working on climate change, due to the different levels of attention  that these causes currently receive worldwide. Some cause areas, such  as AI safety and global poverty, have gained so much attention within EA  (both in absolute terms and, more so, compared to the general public)  that the EA movement has become somewhat identified with them.

Prioritizing  and comparing cause areas is at the very core of EA. Nevertheless, I  would like to argue that while cause prioritization is extremely  important and should continue, having the EA movement identified with specific cause areas has negative consequences.  I would like to highlight the negative aspects of having such a large  fraction of the attention and resources of EA going into such a small  number of causes, and present the case for more cause diversification  and pluralism within EA.

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/YCa8BRQoxKbmf5CJb/p/vQpk3cxdAe5RX9xzo

Read & Edited by Garrett Baker

Spoilers ahead — listen to the episode beforehand if you don’t want to hear a rough summary first.

I quite liked the "Playing God" episode of RadioLab.

The topic is triage,  the practice of assigning priority to different patients in emergency  medicine. By extension, to triage means to ration scarce resources. The  episode treats triage as a rare phenomenon– in fact, it suggests that  medical triage protocols were not taken very seriously in the US until  after Hurricane Katrina– but triage is not a rare phenomenon at all. We  are engaging in triage with every decision we make.

The stories in “Playing God” are gripping, particularly the story of a  New Orleans hospital thrown into hell in a matter of days after losing  power during Hurricane Katrina. Sheri Fink from the New York Times discusses the events she reported in her book, Five Days at Memorial. The close-up details are difficult to stomach. After evacuating the  intensive care unit, the hospital staff are forced to rank the remaining  patients for evacuation; moving the patients is backbreaking labor  without the elevators, and helicopters and boats are only coming  sporadically to take them away. Sewage is backing up into the hospital  and the extreme heat is causing some patients and pets to have seizures.

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/YCa8BRQoxKbmf5CJb/p/5EqJozsDdHcF7dpPL

In this talk from EAGxBerkeley 2016, Ajeya Cotra shares what led  her to join the effective altruism movement, then provides an overview  of its basic principles.

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LpkXtFXdsRd4rG8Kb/reducing-long-term-risks-from-malevolent-actors

Read by: Wuschel

Edited by: Garrett Baker

• Dictators who exhibited highly narcissistic, psychopathic, or  sadistic traits were involved in some of the greatest catastrophes in  human history. (More)
  
• Malevolent individuals in positions of power could negatively affect  humanity’s long-term trajectory by, for example, exacerbating  international conflict or other broad risk factors. (More)
  
• Malevolent humans with access to advanced technology—such as whole  brain emulation or other forms of transformative AI—could cause serious  existential risks and suffering risks. (More)
  
• We therefore consider interventions to reduce the expected influence of malevolent humans on the long-term future.
  
  The development of manipulation-proof measures of malevolence seems  valuable, since they could be used to screen for malevolent humans in  high-impact settings, such as heads of government or CEOs. (More)
  
  We also explore possible future technologies that may offer unprecedented leverage to mitigate against malevolent traits.  (More)
  
  Selecting against psychopathic and sadistic tendencies in genetically  enhanced, highly intelligent humans might be particularly important.  However, risks of unintended negative consequences must be handled with  extreme caution. (More)
  
• We argue that further work on reducing malevolence would be valuable  from many moral perspectives and constitutes a promising focus area for  longtermist EAs. (More)
  

In this section  I’ll go over the strategies used by players, final scores, and the  winner of the tournament. For the actual outcomes of the predictions,  see the appendix.

The  most common strategy I observed was when a question’s outcome could be  influenced by player behaviour, players would predict an outcome with  99% confidence then devise a plan to make their predicted outcome  happen. One player even made a to-do list:

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/347gJg88ZxxE7Jhch/i-ran-a-forecasting-tournament-at-an-ea-retreat-here-s-what

Read & edited by Garrett Baker

This post describes a simple forecasting tournament I ran during  the 2021 Effective Altruism New Zealand retreat as an experimental  exercise in improving judgement and decision making. I asked players to  predict whether certain events would occur within the span of the  retreat, like whether Peter Singer would post to Instagram, or whether  anyone would lose their hat.

The tournament was  surprisingly fun, and went in many unexpected directions. I would  strongly encourage other EA retreats and similar gatherings to run their  own prediction tournaments, and I provide some resources to get started.

A summary of this post:

1. Motivation for the tournament.
2. Summary of the rules, questions, and scoring system I used.
3. Outcomes of the tournament: strategies used by players and the scores obtained.
4. Discussion of stuff I found interesting or surprising, and changes I would make to future iterations of the tournament.
5. Conclusion and promises for follow-up posts.
6. Appendix: the outcomes of the prediction questions.

The  art of forecasting is an important part of the Effective Altruism  extended universe. There are at least three reasons for this. First, if  you can predict which problems are going to be important in the future,  then you can start preparing solutions now (unaligned AI, runaway  nanotech, engineered pandemics...) Secondly, if you can predict the  future conditional on your actions, then you can choose  interventions which do more good for longer (if we transfer cash to poor  countries, will this help them build a self-sustaining economy, or will  it foster dependence and fragility?) Thirdly, in a broad sense, good  forecasting requires clear thinking and improves decision-making, which  are virtues we want to cultivate in building a wiser society. In other  words, cultivating forecasting skills is an act of everyday longtermism.

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HGLK3igGprWQPHfAp/against-neutrality-about-creating-happy-lives

Narration by: The Girl Reading This

Editing by: Garrett Baker

(Warning: spoilers for the movie American Beauty.)

Various  philosophers have tried hard to validate the so-called “intuition of  neutrality,” according to which the fact that someone would live a  wonderful life, if created, is not itself reason to create them (see  e.g. Frick (2014) for efforts in this vicinity). The oft-quoted slogan from Jan Narveson is: “We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people” (p. 80).

I  don’t have the neutrality intuition. To the contrary, I think that  creating someone who will live a wonderful life is to do, for them,  something incredibly significant and worthwhile. Exactly how to weigh  this against other considerations in different contexts is an additional  and substantially more complex question. But I feel very far from neutral about  it, and I’d hope that others, in considering whether to create me,  wouldn’t feel neutral, either. This post tries to point at why.

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ozyQ7PwhRgP7D9b2w/new-org-canning-what-we-give

Narration by: Pixel Brownie Software (Prownie)

Editing by: Garrett Baker

Epistemic status: 30% (plus or minus 50%). Further details at the bottom.

In the 2019 EA Cause Prioritisation survey,  Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause across the sample  as a whole. But after more engagement with EA, around 42% of people  change their cause area, and of that, a majority (54%) moved towards the  Long Term Future/Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction.

While many people find that donations help them stay engaged (and continue to be a great thing to do), there has been much discussion of other ways people can contribute positively.

In thinking about the long-run future, one area of research has been improving human's resilience to disasters. A 2014 paper looked at global refuges, and more recently ALLFED, among others, have studied ways to feed humanity in disaster scenarios.

There  is much work done, and even much more needed, to directly reduce risks  such as through pandemic preparedness, improving nuclear treaties, and  improving the functioning of international institutions.

But we  believe that there are still opportunities to increase resilience in  disaster scenarios. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to directly  link the simplicity of donations with effective methods for the recovery  of civilisation?

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/i24sXY8v6FXLyJKXF/why-ea-groups-should-not-use-effective-altruism-in-their

Narration by Liam Nolan

Editing by Garrett Baker

One of my teachers, a social entrepreneur, once told me: “when you are doing any kind of project, first make sure to give it a good name.” These words ran through my mind when I, together with five others,  started a new EA student association at Erasmus University Rotterdam in  the Netherlands.

At our second collective meeting we decided against the name  “Effective Altruism Erasmus” and  opted for “Positive Impact Society  Erasmus” (PISE) instead. Now, 6 months in, we still believe this was a  great decision. Our association is doing well, and we believe that our  name has had some part in that.

As we speak, more Dutch EA groups  are considering changing their name. Maastricht University’s chapter is  already called “LEAP” (Local Effective Altruism Project) and the group  at Wageningen University is also considering a name change.

We  think we should have a movement wide conversation about “Effective  Altruism” as the name for local and university groups. Below we have  written down our thoughts on two questions: firstly, should local and university groups have a name other than “Effective Altruism X”? Secondly, if so, what should that name be? Lastly, we propose a common subtitle for all EA groups with an  alternative name. Our thoughts are far from complete and we are  uncertain on many accounts. We invite anyone to add to the discussion!

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RZ4cWxEkTsCqGgfut/how-to-run-a-high-energy-reading-group

Narration by Garrett Baker

Editing by Athenae Galea

Why are reading groups and journal clubs bad so often?

I think there are two reasons: boring readings and low-energy discussions. This post is about how to avoid those pitfalls.

I have participated in (and organized) some really bad reading  groups. This is a shame, because I love a good reading group. They cause  me to read more things and read them more carefully. A great group  discussion will give me way more than I’d get just by taking notes on a  reading.

This is what a bad reading group looks like: six people gather around  a table. Two kind of skimmed the reading, and two didn’t read it at  all. No one knows quite what to talk about. Someone ventures a, “so,  what surprised you about the paper?” Another person flips through their  notes, scanning for a possible answer. Most people stay quiet. No one  leaves the table feeling excited about the reading or about being a part  of the group.

This is avoidable, but you need to find interesting and valuable  readings and you need to structure your group to encourage high-energy  discussions.

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ntLmCbHE2XKhfbzaX/how-much-does-performance-differ-between-people

Narration by Liam Nolan

Audio editing by Garrett Baker

Some people seem to achieve orders of magnitudes more than others in  the same job. For instance, among companies funded by Y Combinator the  top 0.5% account for more than ⅔ of the total market value; and among  successful bestseller authors, the top 1% stay on the New York Times  bestseller list more than 25 times longer than the median author in that  group.

This is a striking and often unappreciated fact, but  raises many questions. How many jobs have these huge differences in  achievements? More importantly, why can achievements differ so  much, and can we identify future top performers in advance? Are some  people much more talented? Have they spent more time practicing key  skills? Did they have more supportive environments, or start with more  resources? Or did the top performers just get lucky?

More  precisely, when recruiting, for instance, we’d want to know the  following: when predicting the future performance of different people in  a given job, what does the distribution of predicted (‘ex-ante’) performance look like?

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2BEecjksNZNHQmdyM/don-t-be-bycatch

It's a common story. Someone who's passionate about EA principles,  but has little in the way of resources, tries and fails to do EA things.  They write blog posts, and nothing happens. They apply to jobs, and  nothing happens. They do research, and don't get that grant. Reading  articles no longer feels exciting, but like a chore, or worse: a  reminder of their own inadequacy. Anybody who comes to this place, I  heartily sympathize, and encourage them to disentangle themselves from  this painful situation any way they can.

Why does this happen? Well, EA has two targets.

1. Subscribers to EA principles who the movement wants to become big donors or effective workers.
2. Big donors and effective workers who the movement wants to subscribe to EA principles.

I  won't claim what weight this community and its institutions give to (1)  vs. (2). But when we set out to catch big fish, we risk turning the  little fish into bycatch. The technical term for this is churn.

Part  of the issue is the planner's fallacy. When we're setting out, we  underestimate how long and costly it will be to achieve an impact, and  overestimate what we'll accomplish. The higher above average you aim  for, the more likely you are to fall short.

And another part is  expectation-setting. If the expectation right from the get-go is that EA  is about quickly achieving big impact, almost everyone will fail, and  think they're just not cut out for it. I wish we had a holiday that was  the opposite of Petrov Day, where we honored somebody who went a little  bit out of their comfort zone to try and be helpful in a small and  simple way. Or whose altruistic endeavor was passionate, costly, yet  ineffective, and who tried it anyway, changed their mind, and valued it  as a learning experience.

Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TMCWXTayji7gvRK9p/is-democracy-a-fad

This cross-post from my personal blog explains why I think democracy will probably recede within the next several centuries, supposing people are still around.

The key points are that: (1) Up until the past couple centuries,  nearly all states have been dictatorships. (2) There are many examples  of system-wide social trends, including the rise of democracy in Ancient  Greece, that have lasted for a couple centuries and then been reversed.  (3) If certain popular theories about democratization are right, then  widespread automation would negate recent economic changes that have  allowed democracy to flourish.

This prediction might have some implications for what people who  are trying to improve the future should do today (although I'm not sure  what these implications are). It might also have some implications for  how we should imagine the future more broadly. For example, it might  give us stronger reasons to doubt that future generations will take inclusive approaches to any consequential decisions they face.