Athena is a new research mentorship program fostering diversity of ideas in AI safety research. We aim to get more women and marginalized genders into technical research and offer the support needed to thrive in this space.

Applications for scholars are open until December 3rd, 2023

Apply as a scholar: here

Apply as a mentor or speaker: here

Financial aid is available for travel expenses for the in-person retreat to those otherwise unable to attend without it

Program Structure

A 2-month hybrid mentorship program for women looking to strengthen their research skills and network in technical AI safety research beginning in January 2024.

This includes 1-week in-person retreat in Oxford, UK followed by a 2-month remote mentorship by established researchers in the field, with networking and weekly research talks.

Athena aims to equip women with the knowledge, skills, and network they need to thrive in AI safety research. We believe that diversity is a strength [...]

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Outline:

(01:32) Who should apply?

(01:53) Application process

(02:08) Questions?

(02:15) Why are we doing this

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First published:

November 7th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B2t559dP65ffKZsDa/announcing-athena-women-in-ai-alignment-research

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

General note: The bulk of this post was written a couple of months ago, but I am releasing it now to coincide with the Effective Giving Spotlight week. I shortly expect to release a second post documenting some observations on the community building funding landscape.

Introduction

Way back in 2010, I was sitting in my parents' house, watching one of my favourite TV shows, the UK's Daily Politics. That day's guest was an Oxford academic by the name of Toby Ord. He was donating everything above £18000 (£26300 in today's money) to charity, and gently pushing others to give 10%.

"Nice guy," I thought. "Pity it'll never catch on."

Two years later, a couple of peers interned at Giving What We Can. At the same time, I did my own internship in finance, and my estimate of my earning potential quadrupled[1]. One year after that, I graduated and took the Giving What We [...]

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Outline:

(01:13) Post goals

(02:28) My path

(03:07) Work

(05:36) Lifestyle Inflation

(07:48) Savings

(09:27) Donations

(10:11) Community

(10:14) Why engage?

(11:58) Why stop?

(13:48) Closing Thoughts

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 7th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gxppfWhx7ta2fkF3R/10-years-of-earning-to-give

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This write-up is a compilation of organisations and projects aligned / adjacent to the effective altruism movement in East Asia and Southeast Asia and was written around the EAGxPhilippines conference. Some organisations, projects, and contributors also prefer to not be public and hence removed from this write-up. While this is not an exhaustive list of projects and organisations per country in the region, it is a good baseline of the progress of the effective altruism movement for this side of the globe.

Feel free to click the links to the organisations/projects themselves to dive deeper into their works.

Contributors: Saad Siddiqui; Anthony Lau; Anthony Obeyesekere; Masayuki "Moon" Nagai; Yi-Yang Chua; Elmerei Cuevas, Alethea Faye Cedaña, Jaynell Ehren Chang, Brian Tan, Nastassja "Tanya" Quijano; Dion Tan, Jia Yang Li; Saeyoung Kim; Nguyen Tran; Alvin Lau
Forum Post Graphic credits to Jaynell Ehren Chang
EAGxPhotos credits to CS Creatives

Mainland China 🇨🇳

China Global Priorities Group 

• Aims [...]

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Outline:

(01:15) Mainland China 🇨🇳

(01:18) China Global Priorities Group

(01:51) City Group: EAHK

(03:13) University Group: EAHKU

(03:39) Academia (AI):

(04:51) Academia (Psychology):

(05:04) Cause specific organisations/ projects

(05:27) EA Indonesia

(08:17) EA Japan

(09:36) Malaysia 🇲🇾

(09:42) EA Malaysia

(10:15) Philippines 🇵🇭

(10:22) A. Meta Organizations/ Projects:

(11:18) B. Some Cause Specific Organisations

(12:57) Singapore 🇸🇬

(13:03) EA Singapore

(13:19) EA NUS

(13:27) Welfare Matters

(13:35) CEARCH

(13:45) GFI APAC

(13:53) Global Food Partners

(13:59) Effective Giving SG

(14:08) AI Safety

(14:14) South Korea 🇰🇷

(14:17) EA South Korea

(14:40) Viet Nam 🇻🇳

(14:46) EA Viet Nam

(14:55) EA Fullbright (Fulbright University Vietnam)

(15:02) LessWrong Vietnam

(15:11) Shrimp Welfare Project

(15:15) Taiwan 🇹🇼

(15:21) EA Taiwan

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First published:

November 6th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NrqGyXzvwB2Gqu6XW/state-of-the-east-and-southeast-asian-eacosystem

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TLDR: The best research we have shows that clean water may provide a 30% mortality reduction to children under 5. This might be the biggest mortality reduction of any single global health intervention, yet we don’t understand why it works.

Here, I share my journey exploring a life-saving intervention that we don’t fully understand, but really should. I may err a little on the side of artistic license - so if you find inaccuracies please forgive me, correct me or even feel free to just tear me to shreds in the comments ;).

Part 1: Givewell's Seemingly absurd numbers

I first became curious after a glance at what seemed like a dubious GiveWell funded project. A $450,000 dollar scoping grant for water chlorination in Rwanda? This didn’t make intuitive sense to me.

In Sub-saharan Africa diarrhoea causes 5-10% of child mortality. While significant, the diarrhea problem continues to improve with better access to [...]

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Outline:

(02:26) Part 2: A Nobel Prize winner's innovative math

(04:27) Part 3. We already knew about this anomaly – 100 years ago

(08:10) Part 5: What next for clean water?

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 4th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hFPbe2ZwmB9athsXT/clean-water-the-incredible-30-mortality-reducer-we-can-t

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post is a part of Rethink Priorities’ Worldview Investigations Team's CURVE Sequence: “Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation.” The aim of this sequence is twofold: first, to consider alternatives to expected value maximization for cause prioritization; second, to evaluate the claim that a commitment to expected value maximization robustly supports the conclusion that we ought to prioritize existential risk mitigation over all else. This post presents a software tool we're developing to better understand risk and effectiveness.

Executive Summary

The cross-cause cost-effectiveness model (CCM) is a software tool under development by Rethink Priorities to produce cost-effectiveness evaluations in different cause areas.

• The CCM enables evaluations of interventions in global health and development, animal welfare, and existential risk mitigation.
• The CCM also includes functionality for evaluating research projects aimed at improving existing interventions or discovering more effective alternatives.

The CCM follows a Monte Carlo approach to assessing probabilities.

• The CCM accepts user-supplied distributions as parameter [...]

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Outline:

(00:43) Executive Summary

(04:24) Purpose

(05:36) Key Features

(05:52) We model uncertainty with simulations

(06:38) We incorporate user-specified parameter distributions

(07:17) Our results capture outcome ineffectiveness

(08:42) We enable users to specify the probability of extinction for different future eras

(09:28) Structure

(10:08) Intervention module

(10:40) Global Health and Development

(11:14) Animal Welfare

(12:00) Existential Risk Mitigation

(13:59) Research projects module

(14:56) Limitations

(15:12) It is geared towards specific kinds of interventions

(16:24) Distributions are a questionable way of handling deep uncertainty

(17:13) The model doesn’t handle model uncertainty

(18:01) The model assumes parameter independence

(18:59) Lessons

(19:06) The expected value of existential risk mitigation interventions depends on future population dynamics

(20:15) The value of existential risk mitigation is extremely variable

(21:38) Tail-end results can capture a huge amount of expected value

(22:22) Unrepresented correlations may be decisive

(23:43) Future Plans

(24:49) Acknowledgements

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First published:

November 3rd, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pniDWyjc9vY5sjGre/rethink-priorities-cross-cause-cost-effectiveness-model

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

A key question for many interventions' impact is how long the intervention changes some output counterfactually, or how long the intervention washes out. This is often the case for work to change policy: the cost-effectiveness of efforts to pass animal welfare ballot initiatives, nuclear non-proliferation policy, climate policy, and voting reform, for example, will depend on (a) whether those policies get repealed and (b) whether they would pass anyway. Often there is an explicit assumption, e.g., that passing a policy is equivalent to speeding up when it would have gone into place anyway by X years.[1] [2] As people routinely note when making these assumptions, it is very unclear what assumption would be appropriate.

In a new paper (my economics "job market paper"), I address this question, focusing on U.S. referendums but with some data on other policymaking processes:

Policy choices sometimes appear stubbornly persistent, even when they become politically unpopular or [...]

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Outline:

(02:20) Overview of Results and Methods

(06:23) Notes Particular to the EA Community

(06:27) Policy Changes Seem to Matter (Much) Longer than EAs Have Assumed

(07:34) Neglectedness Matters

(08:02) Comparing Persistence: Can We Compare Policy to Other Social Changes?

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

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First published:

November 2nd, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jCwuozHHjeoLPLemB/how-long-do-policy-changes-matter-new-paper

Linkpost URL:
https://zachfreitasgroff.com/FreitasGroff_Policy_Persistence.pdf

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

YouGov recently reported the results of a survey (n=1000) suggesting that about “one in five (22%) Americans are familiar with effective altruism.”[1]

We think these results are exceptionally unlikely to be true. Their 22% figure is very similar to the proportion of Americans we previously found claim to have heard of effective altruism (19%) in our earlier survey (n=6130). But, after conducting appropriate checks, we estimated that much lower percentages are likely to have genuinely heard of EA[2] (2.6% after the most stringent checks, which we speculate is still likely to be somewhat inflated[3]).

Is it possible that these numbers have simply dramatically increased following the FTX scandal?

Fortunately, we have tested this with multiple followup surveys explicitly designed with this possibility in mind.[4]

In our most recent survey (conducted October 6th[5]), we estimated that approximately 16% (13.0%-20.4%) of US adults would claim to have heard of EA. Yet, when we add in [...]

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Outline:

(02:00) Attitudes towards EA

(02:35) Conclusions

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 2nd, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CwKiAt54aJjcqoQDh/are-1-in-5-americans-familiar-with-ea

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Intro

A few months ago, the other (former) Alvea executives and I made the difficult decision to wind Alvea down and return our remaining funding to investors. In this post, I’ll share an overview of Alvea's story and highlight a few of our wins and challenges from my perspective as an Alvea Co-Founder and former CTO, in hopes that our experiences might be useful to others who are working on (or considering) ambitious projects to solve the biggest problems in the world. I’m sharing everything below in a personal capacity and as a window into my current thinking—this is not the definitive or official word on Alvea and it doesn’t necessarily represent the views of any other Alvea team members. I expect my reflections to continue evolving as I further process the journey and outcomes of this project, and hope to share more along the way.

Alvea's Story

First vaccine sprint and [...]

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Outline:

(00:05) Intro

(00:55) Alvea's Story

(00:59) First vaccine sprint and decision to continue Alvea (December 2021 through April 2022)

(02:48) Product pursuits (May 2022 through July 2022)

(04:04) Second vaccine sprint (August 2022-December 2023)

(05:22) Funding environment change and pivot (Dec 2022 - May 2023)

(07:33) Wind down and PanLabs spin out (June-Present)

(09:08) Wins

(09:11) Record time to safe clinical development

(10:12) General-purpose rapid drug development capacity

(11:12) Team Development

(12:09) Medical countermeasure knowledge

(13:02) Challenges

(13:22) Challenges of rapid growth

(14:21) Costs of complex non-standard corporate set up

(15:00) Navigating the transition from short- to long-term goals

(16:12) Conclusion

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First published:

November 1st, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/d9bamQHBAwAjuKtNA/alvea-s-story-wins-and-challenges-unofficial

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

After careful consideration, we made the difficult decision to wind Alvea down and return our remaining funds to investors. This decision was the result of many months of experimentation and analysis regarding Alvea's strategy, path to impact, and commercial potential, which ultimately led us to the conclusion that Alvea's overall prospects were not sufficiently compelling to justify the requisite investment of money, time, and energy over the coming years.

Alvea started in late 2021 as a moonshot to rapidly develop and deploy a room temperature-stable DNA vaccine candidate against the Omicron wave of COVID-19, and we soon became the fastest startup to take a new drug from founding to a Phase 1 clinical trial. However, we decided to discontinue our lead candidate during the follow-up period of the trial as the case for large-scale impact weakened amidst the evolving pandemic landscape. Over the following year, we explored different applications of our [...]

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First published:

November 1st, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3EjExF8HeJbmk4Bp4/alvea-wind-down-announcement-official

Linkpost URL:
https://www.alvea.bio/winddown/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Released today (10/30/23) this is crazy, perhaps the most sweeping action taken by government on AI yet.

Below, I've segmented by x-risk and near term risk related proposals. It's worth noting that some of these are very specific and direct an action to be taken by one of the executive branch organizations (i.e. sharing of saftey test results) but others are guidances, which involve "calls on Congress" to pass legislation that codifies the desired action.

Existential Risk Related Actions:

• Require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government. In accordance with the Defense Production Act, the Order will require that companies developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety must notify the federal government when training the model, and must share the results of all [...]

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Outline:

(00:37) Existential Risk Related Actions:

(03:10) Near Term Risk Actions:

(03:14) General

(03:46) Privacy

(04:33) Discrimination

(05:11) Jobs

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First published:

October 30th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pcbsM45vLmHcFpNnr/president-biden-issues-executive-order-on-safe-secure-and

Linkpost URL:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/10/30/fact-sheet-president-biden-issues-executive-order-on-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-artificial-intelligence/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.