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client: ea_forum
project_id: red_team
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 3h30m
qa_time: 1h15m
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This essay is a reconciliation of moral commitment and the good life. Here is its essence in two paragraphs:

Totalized by an ought, I sought its source outside myself. I found nothing. The ought came from me, an internal whip toward a thing which, confusingly, I already wanted – to see others flourish. I dropped the whip. My want now rested, commensurate, amidst others of its kind – terminal wants for ends-in-themselves: loving, dancing, and the other spiritual requirements of my particular life. To say that these were lesser seemed to say, “It is more vital and urgent to eat well than to drink or sleep well.” No – I will eat, sleep, and drink well to feel alive; so too will I love and dance as well as help.

Once, the material requirements of life were in competition: If we spent time building shelter it might jeopardize daylight that could have been spent hunting. We built communities to take the material requirements of life out of competition. For many of us, the task remains to do the same for our spirits. Particularly so for those working outside of organized religion on huge, consuming causes. I suggest such a community might practice something like “fractal altruism,” taking the good life at the scale of its individuals out of competition with impact at the scale of the world.

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AjxqsDmhGiW9g8ju6/effective-altruism-in-the-garden-of-ends

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• Innovations for Poverty Action

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
feed_id: ai, ai_safety, ai_safety__technical
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h30m
qa_time: 35m
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The long-term future of intelligent life is currently unpredictable and undetermined. In the linked document, we argue that the invention of artificial general intelligence (AGI) could change this by making extreme types of lock-in technologically feasible. In particular, we argue that AGI would make it technologically feasible to (i) perfectly preserve nuanced specifications of a wide variety of values or goals far into the future, and (ii) develop AGI-based institutions that would (with high probability) competently pursue any such values for at least millions, and plausibly trillions, of years.

The rest of this post contains the summary (6 pages), with links to relevant sections of the main document (40 pages) for readers who want more details.

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KqCybin8rtfP3qztq/agi-and-lock-in

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---
client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
feed_id: ai, ai_safety, ai_safety__technical, ai_safety__governance
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 5h
qa_time: 2h15m
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This is going to be a list of holes I see in the basic argument for existential risk from superhuman AI systems.

To start, here’s an outline of what I take to be the basic case:
I. If superhuman AI systems are built, any given system is likely to be ‘goal-directed’
II. If goal-directed superhuman AI systems are built, their desired outcomes will probably be about as bad as an empty universe by human lights
III. If most goal-directed superhuman AI systems have bad goals, the future will very likely be bad

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zoWypGfXLmYsDFivk/counterarguments-to-the-basic-ai-risk-case

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 2h15m
qa_time: 50m
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Understanding the relationship between wellbeing and economic growth is a topic that is of key importance to Effective Altruism (e.g. see Hillebrandt and Hallstead, Clare and Goth). In particular, a key disagreement regards the Easterlin Paradox; the finding that happiness varies with income across countries and between individuals, but does not seem to vary significantly with a country’s income as it changes over time. Michael Plant recently wrote an excellent post summarizing this research. He ends up mostly agreeing with Richard Easterlin’s latest paper arguing that the Easterlin Paradox still holds; suggesting that we should look to approaches other than economic growth to boost happiness. I agree with Michael Plant that life satisfaction is a valid and reliable measure, that it should be a key goal of policy and philanthropy, and that boosting income does not increase it as much as we might naively expect. In fact, we at Founders Pledge highly value and regularly use Michael Plant’s and Happier Lives Institute’s (HLI) research; and we believe income is only a small part of what interventions should aim at. However, my interpretation of the practical implications of Easterlin’s research differ from Easterlin’s in three ways which I argue in this post.

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/coryFCkmcMKdJb7Pz/does-economic-growth-meaningfully-improve-well-being-an

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h20m
qa_time: 1h30m
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I want to know what’s going on in the world. I’m a human; I’m interested in what other humans are up to; I value them, care about their triumphs and mourn their deaths.
But:

• There’s far too much going on for me to keep track of all of it
• I think that some parts of what’s going are likely far more important than others
• I don’t think that regular news providers are picking the important bits to report on

I would really like there to be a scope sensitive news provider which was making a good faith attempt to report on the things which most matter in the world. But as far as I know, this doesn’t exist.

In the absence of such a provider, I’ve spent a small amount of time trying to find out some basic context on what happens in the world on the average day. I think of this as a bit like a cheat sheet: some information to have in the back of my mind when reading whatever regular news stories are coming at me, to ground me in something that feels a bit closer to what’s actually going on.

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rXYW9GPsmwZYu3doX/what-happens-on-the-average-day

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 45m
qa_time: 15m
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We will never know their names. The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it — victims of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done — humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jk7A3NMdbxp65kcJJ/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-more

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client: ea_forum
project_id: red_team
feed_id: ai, ai_safety, ai_safety__forecasting
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 3h15m
qa_time: 1h30m
---

In this note I’ll summarize the bio-anchors report, describe my initial reactions to it, and take a closer look at two disagreements that I have with background assumptions used by (readers of) the report.

This report attempts to forecast the year when the amount of compute required to train a transformative AI (TAI) model will first become available, as the year when a forecast for the amount of compute required to train TAI in a given year will intersect a forecast for the amount of compute that will be available for a training run of a single project in a given year.

Original article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_GqOrCo29qKly1z48-mR86IV7TUDfzaEXxD3lGFQ8Wk/edit#

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h
qa_time: 30m
---

So far, long-termist efforts to change the trajectory of the world focus on far-off events. This is on the assumption that we foresee some important problem and influence its outcome by working on the problem for longer. We thus start working on it sooner than others, we lay the groundwork for future research, we raise awareness, and so on.

Many longtermists propose that we now live at the “hinge of history”, usually understood on the timescale of critical centuries, or critical decades. But ”hinginess” is likely not constant: some short periods will be significantly more eventful than others. It is also possible that these periods will present even more leveraged opportunities for changing the world’s trajectory.

These “maximally hingey” moments might be best influenced by sustained efforts long before them (as described above). But it seems plausible that in many cases, the best realistic chance to influence them is “while they are happening”, via a concentrated effort at that moment.

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sgcxDwyD2KL6BHH2C/case-for-emergency-response-teams

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 4h15m
qa_time: 1h30m
---

Shrimp Welfare Project produced this report to guide our decision making on funding for further research into shrimp welfare and on which interventions to allocate our resources. We are cross-posting this on the forum because we think it may be useful to share the complexity of understanding the needs of beneficiaries who cannot communicate with us. We also hope it will be useful for other organisations working on shrimp welfare, and it’s also hopefully an interesting read!

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nGrmemHzQvBpnXkNX/what-matters-to-shrimps-factors-affecting-shrimp-welfare-in

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