EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

You finally want to resolve deeper-seated inner conflicts, and remove inner blocks in the way of becoming a more fulfilled, resilient, and well-performing version of yourself? This post allows you to learn how IFS as a coaching or therapy approach can help with mental wellbeing, if it might be the right approach for you, if so to get excited about it and inform you about the opportunity to take part in Rethink Wellbeing's online IFS group course starting this August.

Executive Summary

Rethink Wellbeing's (RW) launches a brand new online IFS course for ambitious altruists. Learn powerful, and practical tools to uncover the dynamics of your inner conflicts, become a more whole and resilient self, and transform your mental wellbeing and performance. You will meet with a peer group of 5-7 like-minded ambitious altruists led by a trained peer facilitator, for 6 weeks and 3 follow-ups. The course empowers [...]

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Outline:

(00:36) Executive Summary

(03:13) How IFS works

(05:00) Parts in the IFS Model

(05:39) Theory of change

(06:11) Why Rethink Wellbeing chose IFS

(09:28) Overview of the IFS Course

(09:33) Program highlights

(11:08) Timeline

(12:41) Accessibility and cost

(13:41) Might IFS be right for you?

(13:59) Common concerns from EA's and Rationalists

(15:58) Still not sure? Helpful resources to check out

(16:43) Interested?

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First published:

July 15th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9eKPizEkvhqhLZxLv/apply-now-get-unstuck-with-the-new-ifs-self-care-fellowship

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Edits: 

The priority deadline was extended to July 28, but we will continue accepting applications on a rolling basis.

The language around compensation has been updated.

Job Summary

Effective Altruism NYC is seeking an ambitious Executive Director to help oversee the strategy, execution, and management of our impact-oriented programs and back-office operations.

The Executive Director will help define the vision and goals that the organization wants to fulfill, design programs to achieve that vision, and lead the successful completion of any new goals as well as the organization's compliance needs. They’ll be responsible for the onboarding and management of any new employees, volunteers, and/or interns and report directly to the Board of Directors.[1]

Competitive candidates have prior experience managing open-ended tasks, taking initiative without supervision, communicating effectively with diverse stakeholders, and learning quickly on the job.

We think this is a great opportunity to help individuals find their unique [...]

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Outline:

(00:06) Edits:

(00:21) Job Summary

(02:13) Referral Program

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 15th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qFxpTkPT6PbQ7s6xi/effective-altruism-nyc-is-hiring-an-executive-director

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

We are excited to announce that the Animal Ethics website is now available in Arabic. This marks an important milestone in our mission to spread ideas that can help all animals. With Arabic being the 5th most spoken language in the world, this effectively opens it up to over 300 million more people who can have access to this important information.

The suffering of animals is a global issue, so it is crucial that resources like ours can be accessed by diverse audiences worldwide.

Animal Ethics provides realistic perspectives on the lives animals lead, especially wild animals, and how we can help them. Covering topics from speciesism to wild animal suffering, our website curates scientific and philosophical information to further the animal protection movement. Our aim is to inspire academics, students, and concerned citizens to join us in reducing animal suffering, through their careers or outside of [...]

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First published:

July 15th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QMWb7rHACnQWea26h/animal-ethics-website-now-in-arabic

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This post is written in a spirit of constructive criticism. It's phrased fairly abstractly, in part because it's a sensitive topic, but I welcome critiques and comments below. The post is structured in terms of three claims about the strategic dynamics of AI safety efforts; my main intention is to raise awareness of these dynamics, rather than advocate for any particular response to them.

Claim 1: The AI safety community is structurally power-seeking.

By “structurally power-seeking” I mean: tends to take actions which significantly increase its power. This does not imply that people in the AI safety community are selfish or power-hungry; or even that these strategies are misguided. Taking the right actions for the right reasons often involves accumulating some amount of power. However, from the perspective of an external observer, it's difficult to know how much to trust stated motivations, especially when they often lead to the [...]

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First published:

July 16th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wcKD8dJgC55cLijN3/towards-more-cooperative-ai-safety-strategies

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This is a link post.

Folks in philanthropy and development definitely know that the Gates Foundation is the largest private player in that realm by far. Until recently it was likely to get even larger, as Warren Buffet had stated that the Foundation would receive the bulk of his assets when he died. A few weeks ago, Buffet announced that he had changed his mind, and was instead going to create a new trust for his assets, to be jointly managed by his children. It's a huge change, but I don't think very many people took note of what it means ("A billionaire is going to create his own foundation rather than giving to an existing one; seems unsurprising."). So I created this chart:

The new Buffet-funded trust is going to be nearly twice as large as the Gates Foundation, and nearly 150% larger than most of the other brand [...]

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First published:

July 15th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bqi2M8oayRDvuGQg9/warren-buffett-changes-giving-plans-for-the-worse

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It's quite possible someone has already argued this, but I thought I should share just in case not.

Goal-Optimisers and Planner-Simulators

When people in the past discussed worries about AI development, this was often about AI agents - AIs that had goals they were attempting to achieve, objective functions they were trying to maximise. At the beginning we would make fairly low-intelligence agents, which were not very good at achieving things, and then over time we would make them more and more intelligent. At some point around human-level they would start to take-off, because humans are approximately intelligent enough to self-improve, and this would be much easier in silicon.

This does not seem to be exactly how things have turned out. We have AIs that are much better than humans at many things, such that if a human had these skills we would think they were extremely capable. And [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Goal-Optimisers and Planner-Simulators

(01:17) What is the significance for existential risk?

(02:43) How could we react to this?

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First published:

July 14th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CR7TjgsZgv8f5ST6h/llms-as-a-planning-overhang

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post is part of WIT's CRAFT sequence. It examines one of the decision theories included in the Portfolio Builder Tool.

Executive summary

• Expected value maximization (EVM) leads to problems of fanaticism, recommending that you ought to take gambles on actions that have very low probabilities of success if the potential outcomes would be extremely valuable. This has motivated some to adopt alternative decision procedures.
• One common method for moderating the fanatical effects of EVM is to ignore very low probability outcomes, rounding them down to 0. Then, one maximizes EV across the remaining set of sufficiently probable outcomes.
• We can distinguish between two types of low probabilities that could be candidates for rounding down. A decision-theoretic defense of rounding down states that we should (or are permitted to) round down low objective chances. An epistemic defense states that we should (or are permitted to) round down low [...]

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Outline:

(00:20) Executive summary

(02:22) 1. Intro

(11:06) 2. Rounding down

(14:28) 3. Decision-theoretic rounding down

(18:10) 4. Objections to decision-theoretic rounding down

(18:34) 4.1. Objection 1: Ignores important outcomes

(20:24) 4.2. Objection 2: Neglects decisions under the threshold

(23:17) 4.3. Objection 3: Normative arbitrariness

(26:45) 4.4. Objection 4: The threshold for rounding down is arbitrary

(29:36) 5.1. Tolerance

(32:04) 5.2. Specificity and Resolution

(35:36) 5.3. Amorphousness

(37:47) 6. Why round down?

(43:45) 7. An epistemic defense of rounding down

(50:34) 8. Implications for decisions in EA

(52:30) Acknowledgments

The original text contained 30 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 15th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/N2FQihzG6SW5BfvtS/an-epistemic-defense-of-rounding-down

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Summary/Introduction

Aschenbrenner's ‘Situational Awareness’ (Aschenbrenner, 2024) promotes a dangerous narrative of national securitisation. This narrative is not, despite what Aschenbrenner suggests, descriptive, but rather, it is performative, constructing a particular notion of security that makes the dangerous world Aschenbrenner describes more likely to happen.

This piece draws on the work of Nathan A. Sears (2023), who argues that the failure to sufficiently eliminate plausible existential threats throughout the 20th century emerges from a ‘national securitisation’ narrative winning out over a ‘humanity macrosecuritization narrative’. National securitisation privileges extraordinary measures to defend the nation, often centred around military force and logics of deterrence/balance of power and defence. Humanity macrosecuritization suggests the object of security is to defend all of humanity, not just the nation, and often invokes logics of collaboration, mutual restraint and constraints on sovereignty. Sears uses a number of examples to show that when issues are constructed as issues [...]

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Outline:

(00:08) Summary/Introduction

(03:03) Section 1- What is securitisation

(07:39) Section 2: Sears 2023 - The macrosecuritization of Existential Threats to humanity

(16:25) Section 3 - How does this relate to Aschenbrenner's ‘Situational Awareness’?

(19:49) Section 4 - Why Aschenbrenners narrative is dangerous and the role of expert communities

(29:35) Section 5- The possibility of a moratorium, military conflict and collaboration

(36:51) Conclusion

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First published:

July 15th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H6xEhur9Lbbv9dhBC/against-aschenbrenner-how-situational-awareness-constructs-a

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Highlights

1. Destabilization could be the biggest setback for great power conflict, AI, bio-risk, and climate disruption.
2. Polarization plays a role in nearly every causal pathway leading to destabilization of the United States, and there is no indication polarization will decrease.
3. The United States fits the pattern of past democracies that have descended into authoritarian regimes in many key aspects.
4. The most recent empirical research on civil conflicts suggests the United States is in a category that has a 4% annual risk of falling into a civil conflict.
5. In 2022 (when this was originally written), Mike Berkowitz, ED of Democracy Funders Network and 80,000 Hours guest, believes there is 50% chance American democracy fails in the next 6 years.
6. For every dollar spent on depolarization efforts, there are probably at least a hundred dollars spent aggravating the culture war.
7. Destabilization of the United States could wipe out billions of dollars of pledged EA funds.

Note following the [...]

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Outline:

(00:07) Highlights

(01:16) Note following the assassination attempt of former President Trump

(02:45) Preface

(06:10) Acknowledgements

(06:24) Summary

(09:08) Possibility

(10:02) Big picture

(10:06) Authoritarianism

(12:57) Civil conflict

(16:50) Polarization

(20:40) How close we already came (January 6th)

(26:42) A note on the military counter argument

(28:18) Top reasons why the United States wouldn’t destabilize

(29:14) What I would have included in a longer version

(29:51) Conclusion

(31:36) Importance

(31:59) Global ramifications and great power conflict

(33:17) Artificial Intelligence and bio-risk

(33:22) Applicable to both

(34:27) Artificial Intelligence

(34:48) Accelerating climate disruption

(34:52) Authoritarianism

(35:25) Civil conflict

(36:08) Significance

(37:02) Effects on the Effective Altruism movement

(37:06) Talent

(37:29) Funds

(38:15) Plausible scenario

(39:01) Neglectedness

(40:36) Through the lens of polarization

(42:03) Tractability

(44:15) What is needed

(44:18) The broad needs

(44:46) Structural-reform needs\[80\]

(46:03) Needs for stopping polarizing forces

(46:38) Needs for Depolarizing the population

(46:58) Why it's difficult

(47:02) Structural reform

(47:36) Stopping polarizing forces

(49:01) Depolarize the population

(50:36) Where there is traction

(50:40) Ballot initiatives

(51:29) Robust federalism

(51:48) Prescription (what OP/EA could do)

(53:04) Funding and scaling existing efforts

(53:09) Create an operation focused on recruiting more funders and key non-funder partners to this effort

(54:00) Fund ballot initiative efforts and organizations

(56:15) Fund existing depolarization efforts and organizations

(56:51) Fund new organizations to fill gaps through an approach similar to the arrangement between CE and FTX for biosecurity

(57:54) Fund experiments/projects that will give us actionable information

(58:30) Miscellaneous interventions

(58:34) Preempting accelerationist events

(01:00:19) Invest in local journalism

(01:00:51) Promote sincere populist leadership in the Republican apparatus to replace culture warriors

(01:03:49) Invest in mutual aid networks

(01:04:17) Strengthening unions and preparing for a general strike

(01:05:32) My personal favorite

(01:05:36) Left-Right coalitions to run a slate of ballot-initiatives for structural reform

(01:06:49) Uncertainties (why OP/EA should do a medium-level investigation)

(01:08:21) Conclusion/call to action

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First published:

July 15th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kmx3rKh2K4ANwMqpW/destabilization-of-the-united-states-the-top-x-factor-ea

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Hi! My name is Malin and I wrote my master's thesis in cognitive science in collaboration with Don Efficace, a young evaluator organization building their evaluation process to find the most effective charities in France. Together, we set out to explore the concept of noise (see below) in charity evaluations. Many researchers from other evaluator organizations contributed to this endeavor by responding to my survey or participating in interviews. This post serves to summarize my research for them and anyone else who is interested in the topic - have a good read!

TL:DR

Noise, as defined by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein[1], refers to the unwanted variability in judgments caused by cognitive biases. In charity evaluations, this inconsistency can lead to unreliable recommendations, which can significantly affect the allocation of funds and erode donor trust. Given the complex nature of charity evaluations, noise is likely to [...]

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Outline:

(00:41) TL:DR

(02:23) Introduction: Noise

(03:58) Noise in Charity Evaluations

(06:14) Noise-Reduction Strategies

(06:33) 1. Decision Guidelines and Scales

(10:41) 2. Aggregation

(14:05) 3. Sequencing Information

(15:19) 4. Structured Interviews

(15:56) 5. “Mediating Assessments Protocol”

(17:35) Future Research

(18:31) Summary and Recommendations

The original text contained 22 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.

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First published:

July 11th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aJ8EXHydjNPDA9GEa/exploring-noise-in-charity-evaluations

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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