EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

The Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH) works on cause prioritization research as well as grantmaking and donor advisory. This project is an external evaluation of Giving What We Can (GWWC) – specifically, its giving multiplier.

We are grateful to the GWWC team for all the advice and data they have provided to us, and for their outstanding transparency and cooperation; we are also grateful to the various effective giving organizations and meta grantmakers we consulted during the research process. To avoid any conflict of interest, we have explicitly declined to be evaluated by GWWC in 2024 for its evaluate-the-evaluators project.

Outline

This is an estimate of GWWC's giving multiplier. This evaluation differs from GWWC's previous impact evaluation in two important ways:

• This is a prospective analysis aimed at estimating the marginal value of funding GWWC going forward (particularly, in 2025); in contrast, GWWC's previous evaluation was a retrospective [...]

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Outline:

(00:49) Outline

(01:49) Results

(02:10) Key Model Parameters

(05:35) Actionable Implications

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Sentience - famously known for its initiative to abolish factory farming - just launched a new petition targeting two major Swiss retailers, Coop and Migros.

Together, Coop and Migros hold a market share close to 80% in Switzerland. They bear a critical responsibility for the development of the poultry industry in the country.

The Swiss poultry industry in two key figures:

• 85 million farmed animals are slaughtered annually in Switzerland. In 2023, chickens accounted for 83 million of these animals.
• 92% of these chickens come from fast-growing breeds (which are genetically preprogrammed to suffer)

In practice, Sentience is asking retailers to:

• 1) Adopt slower-growing chicken breeds, which show greater health and welfare outcomes (and cease using fast-growing strains by 2026).
• 2) Stop promoting problematic products by the end of 2024, this includes advertising and campaigns for products from intensive chicken farming.
• 3) Provide transparent reporting on the selection [...]

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Introduction

In April 2024, my colleague and I (both affiliated with Peking University) conducted a survey involving 510 students from Tsinghua University and 518 students from Peking University—China's two top academic institutions. Our focus was on their perspectives regarding the frontier risks of artificial intelligence.

In the People's Republic of China (PRC), publicly accessible survey data on AI is relatively rare, so we hope this report provides some valuable insights into how people in the PRC are thinking about AI (especially the risks). Throughout this post, I’ll do my best to weave in other data reflecting the broader Chinese sentiment toward AI.

For similar research, check out The Center for Long-Term Artificial Intelligence, YouGov, Monmouth University, The Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute, and notably, a poll conducted by Rethink Priorities, which closely informed our survey design.

You can read the full report published in the Jamestown Foundation's China Brief [...]

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TL;DR 

• We are interested in supporting and promoting good governance of EA organisations. Currently, we host a directory of candidates looking for board positions at high-impact nonprofits
• Measuring the impact of this work is hard (and we could do better) but we’ve got good reason to believe this is worth maintaining and expanding on
• If you haven’t signed up for the directory, then you should! 
• If you’re thinking about how you can improve the governance of your organisation and/or looking for board members then we would love to speak with you

About us

The Good Governance Project launched in October 2022, with an objective of helping EA organisations create strong boards and governance processes. The project's initial focus was on setting up and maintaining a directory of candidates interested in governance roles within EA organisations, and connecting EA organisations to these candidates.

We first provided an update [...]

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Outline:

(00:06) TL;DR

(00:40) About us

(01:38) Our work so far

(02:32) Measuring impact

(03:33) Beyond the Candidate Directory

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Summary: A blog post circulating among EAs points out that recent presidential elections have been decided by fewer than 100,000 votes. It may be tempting to conclude that each extra vote in a swing state has a 1-in-100,000 chance of changing the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. In this post, I explain why this is not the case. I estimate the actual number to be 1-in-3 million for a vote in Pennsylvania (the most important swing state) and 1-in-6 million for a generic "swing state vote". This has important implications for people who are deciding whether to donate to efforts to change the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

Introduction

Like most readers of this forum, I want Kamala Harris to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election. I also think that electoral politics as a cause area is underrated by EAs, and in 2020 I wrote a [...]

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Outline:

(00:49) Introduction

(05:29) Part 1: The MTLA quote doesnt tell you the impact of a marginal vote

(05:36) How close should we expect the 2024 election to be?

(07:40) Knowing that 100,000 votes would swing the election isnt a game plan

(09:29) Part 2: So how valuable are swing-state votes?

(09:51) The microHarris: a unit of intervention effectiveness

(11:28) How many microHarrises is an extra vote for Harris?

(15:19) Does Nate Silvers model have too much spread?

(16:34) Conclusion

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The EA Hub will retire on the 6th of October 2024.

In 2022 we announced that we would stop further feature development and maintain the EA Hub until it is ready to be replaced by a new platform. In July this year, the EA Forum launched its People Directory, which offers a searchable directory of people involved in the EA movement, similar to what the Hub provided in the past.

We believe the Forum has now become better positioned to fulfil the EA Hub's mission of connecting people in the EA community online. The Forum team is much better resourced and users have many reasons to visit the Forum (e.g. for posts and events), which is reflected in it having more traffic and users. The Hub's core team has also moved on to other projects.

EA Hub users will be informed of this decision via email. [...]

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In this post, we include what is most important to know when you apply to Meta Charity Funders. We expect to update this post every round.

The most common reasons for rejection

By sharing the most common reasons for rejections, we hope to support future grantees and help people make more informed decisions on whether they should apply to Meta Charity Funders.

• The suggested project is not within scope: A fair amount of applications fall outside of the areas which our donors were interested in supporting. At a high level, Meta Charity Funders exists to fund projects that fall within the “meta” category and are unlikely to be funded by other major funders in this space. See “What we mean by 'meta'” further down.
• The theory of change (ToC) is unclear, unfocused, or seemed implausible: Some applicants do not share sufficient reasoning on how their project (in [...]

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Outline:

(00:18) The most common reasons for rejection

(02:51) What we’re looking for in an application

(04:34) Transparency

(04:37) Individual donors working together

(05:00) Time committed by funders

(05:26) Feedback

(05:56) What is Meta Charity Funders (MCF)?

(07:07) What we mean by meta

(08:57) Example proposal

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By Simon Knutsson and Magnus Vinding

This text is a general introduction to suffering-focused ethics. We describe different types of suffering-focused ethical views and explain some of the reasons why we find suffering-focused views reasonable. We also bring up and discuss some common misunderstandings and objections, and briefly cover some practical implications.

1. The core of suffering-focused ethical views

In essence, suffering-focused ethical views give a foremost priority to the reduction of suffering.[1] According to such views, there is something especially important or urgent about alleviating and preventing suffering. Usually, the primary concern is severe suffering rather than discomforts.

A simple example of a clearly suffering-focused view is the view that our only moral obligation is to reduce suffering as much as we can. Yet there are many types of suffering-focused views, as we will see in the next section. For instance, there can be differences in how [...]

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Outline:

(00:29) 1. The core of suffering-focused ethical views

(01:34) 2. Different types of suffering-focused views

(02:50) 2.1 Consequentialist views

(04:06) 2.2 Views focused on consequences along with other considerations

(04:41) 2.3 Views based on categorical norms

(05:30) 2.4 Prioritising the reduction of suffering in certain domains, such as politics

(05:57) 2.5 Ideas that tend toward a focus on suffering

(06:53) 3. Why we find suffering-focused views reasonable

(07:33) 3.1 The importance of severe suffering

(09:46) 3.2 The importance of severe suffering compared to purported goods

(14:01) 3.3 The non-existence of positive final value

(17:55) 4. Misunderstandings about suffering-focused ethics

(18:01) 4.1 World destruction

(19:32) 4.2 Pro-death

(21:36) 5. On objections to suffering-focused views

(23:51) 5.1 Placing too much importance on suffering when choosing outcomes

(26:29) 5.2 World destruction

(29:41) 6. Priorities from a suffering-focused perspective

(30:10) 6.1 Reducing risks of worst-case outcomes

(30:39) 6.2 Reducing the suffering of non-human animals

(31:11) 6.3 Reducing the suffering of the worst-off humans

(31:37) 6.4 Reducing suffering in everyday life

(32:53) 7. Conclusion

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Crossposted from https://williamrsaunders.substack.com/p/principles-for-the-agi-race

Why form principles for the AGI Race?

I worked at OpenAI for 3 years, on the Alignment and Superalignment teams. Our goal was to prepare for the possibility that OpenAI succeeded in its stated mission of building AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, roughly able to do most things a human can do), and then proceed on to make systems smarter than most humans. This will predictably face novel problems in controlling and shaping systems smarter than their supervisors and creators, which we don't currently know how to solve. It's not clear when this will happen, but a number of people would throw around estimates of this happening within a few years.

While there, I would sometimes dream about what would have happened if I’d been a nuclear physicist in the 1940s. I do think that many of the kind of people who get involved in the effective [...]

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Outline:

(00:06) Why form principles for the AGI Race?

(03:32) Bad High Risk Decisions

(04:46) Unnecessary Races to Develop Risky Technology

(05:17) High Risk Decision Principles

(05:21) Principle 1: Seek as broad and legitimate authority for your decisions as is possible under the circumstances

(07:20) Principle 2: Don’t take actions which impose significant risks to others without overwhelming evidence of net benefit

(10:52) Race Principles

(10:56) What is a Race?

(12:18) Principle 3: When racing, have an exit strategy

(13:03) Principle 4: Maintain accurate race intelligence at all times.

(14:23) Principle 5: Evaluate how bad it is for your opponent to win instead of you, and balance this against the risks of racing

(15:07) Principle 6: Seriously attempt alternatives to racing

(16:58) Meta Principles

(17:01) Principle 7: Don’t give power to people or structures that can’t be held accountable.

(18:36) Principle 8: Notice when you can’t uphold your own principles.

(19:17) Application of my Principles

(19:21) Working at OpenAI

(24:19) SB 1047

(28:32) Call to Action

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Meta Charity Funders is a funding circle consisting of ~10 funders, that funds meta initiatives and serves as an alternative to Open Philanthropy and EA funds.

We’re launching the third round of Meta Charity Funders. Apply for funding by September 30th or join the circle as a donor.

We expect all applicants to have read this post's twin post, “Meta Charity Funders: What you need to know when applying” to understand how to write your application.

Focus of this round

• We expect to fund many initiatives not on this list, but some projects that members of our circle have expressed extra interest in funding this round are:
  • Ultra-high-net-worth-individual advising. However, we want to stress that we believe the skillset to do this well is rare, and these types of applications will be extra scrutinized.
  • Effective Giving/Giving multiplier-organizations. For example, the ones incubated by CE's Effective Giving Incubation program.
  • [...]

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Outline:

(00:37) Focus of this round

(01:27) Information for this round

(01:31) Process

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