(Crossposted from Manifund). Summary of the proposal: We will produce a one-hour feature documentary about SB-1047, which would: Serve as a comprehensive reference on the bill's history and implications. Present a balanced view of perspectives from both proponents and opponents, bridging ideological divides.
plus updates on what Manifund has been up to
Government of Karnataka partners with J-PAL South Asia to accelerate and scale policy innovations in school education
The Government of Karnataka has partnered with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South Asia to set up a “learning lab” to solve some of the biggest challenges in school education through science and data.
elewis@poverty…
Mon, 10/28/2024 - 18:07...
How connecting firms to markets can promote economic development
Market access can improve firms’ performance. More research is needed to understand which type of market access programmes are the best at generating firm growth.
elewis@poverty…
Mon, 10/28/2024 - 17:47...
Nobel economics prize awarded for studies of prosperity gaps between countries
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson examined how different kinds of European colonization led to some nations being rich and others poor.
elewis@poverty…
Mon, 10/28/2024 - 17:40...
Three Receive Nobel in Economics for Research on Global Inequality
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson shared the award for their work on explaining the gaps in prosperity between nations.
elewis@poverty…
Mon, 10/28/2024 - 17:39...
Intro. Anthropic recently released an exciting mini-paper on crosscoders (Lindsey et al.). In this post, we open source a model-diffing crosscoder trained on the middle layer residual stream of the Gemma-2 2B base and IT models, along with code, implementation details / tips, and a replication of the core results in Anthropic’s paper.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning applications for cultured meat” has just been published fully open access in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence!. The post New peer-reviewed publication on cell ag & AI appeared first on New Harvest.
We’re delighted to announce the winners of the Essay competition on the Automation of Wisdom and Philosophy.
I became the CEO of EV US in January 2023. I worked alongside the EV US and UK teams, former EV UK CEO Howie Lempel, and current EV UK CEO Rob Gledhill to recover and reform Effective Ventures and improve the robustness of the EA ecosystem in the aftermath of FTX’s collapse.
It’s low tech, but effective.
Why Germany? It has more ATMs than other European countries, and—if I read the article right—they have more money in them.
The best news from our world in data
Plus, AI and Job Displacement, and AI Takes Over the Nobels
The European Commission is seeking feedback on a draft act regarding the establishment of a scientific panel of independent experts under the AI Act. Legislative Process
Implementing act on scientific panel: The European Commission is seeking feedback on a draft act regarding the establishment of a scientific panel of independent experts under the AI Act.
This report outlines what’s needed for human interventions to successfully improve the welfare of wild animals at scale. The post What’s Required For Wild Animal Welfare Interventions To Be Effective appeared first on Faunalytics.
Monday, October 28
The European Commission is seeking feedback on a draft act regarding the establishment of a scientific panel of independent experts under the AI Act.
A Response to Sam Arnold
Mike Morrison, PhD, is an organizational psychologist and the lead UX researcher at Curvenote. While in graduate school in 2019, he posted a YouTube cartoon about creating better research posters and shared the template on the Open Science Framework (OSF). The video has over a million views and #betterposter went viral.
TL;DR: We’re announcing Kairos, a new AI safety fieldbuilding organization focused on the early career talent pipeline. We’re the new home for two programs:FSP, which provides semester-based mentorship for organizers of AI safety university groups. SPAR, a program that pairs early career individuals to work on three-month AI safety research projects alongside experienced mentors. .
When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation - the eureka moment that...
When it was founded in 2015, artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI was a nonprofit organization. The idealistic mission: to make sure the high-stakes work they were doing on artificial intelligence served the whole world. This was necessary because — according to the founders’ fervent belief, at least — it would transform the whole world. In […]...
Rahul will lead Helen Keller’s global efforts to protect the vision of children and adults. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE New York, NY (October 28, 2024) – Helen Keller Intl, a global health organization that partners with communities to protect vision, improve nutrition, and eliminate disease, helping millions of children and families live healthier lives, has named […].
Adapting planting dates, selecting better crop varieties, and increasing access to irrigation and fertilizers could offset potential declines in crop yields.
I think often about the non-immediate future, and wonder how to best allocate effort to make that future better. And the first steps in this process are often to identify interesting classes of scenarios, and then estimate their desirability, chances, and ease of influence.
This is an article by C. Thi Nguyen published recently in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. The abstract reads: Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle — or developing in that direction.
This is a YouTube playlist of recorded lectures on the learning-theoretic AI alignment agenda (LTA) I gave for my MATS scholars of the Winter 2024 cohort, edited by my beloved spouse @Marcus Ogren. H/t William Brewer for helping with the recording, and the rest of the MATS team for making this possible.
Sunday, October 27
I work at the EA Infrastructure Fund, and I'd love to hear people's ideas for what EAIF should fund (and why). I'm particularly interested hearing ideas on this at the moment because. I'm planning on publishing a list of 'projects we'd like to fund' on our website.
In large barns across the US, packed with gates, crates, and hollering farmhands, animals are unloaded, pushed around, reloaded, and hauled away. Those who survive the chaos are sold to the highest bidder, to be killed for their meat. Those unable to cope with the hectic pace, intense heat, and harsh treatment are injured and […]...
@Elizabeth and I recently recorded a conversation of ours that we're hoping becomes a whole podcast series. The original premise is that we were trying to convince each other about whether we should both be EAs or both not be EAs. (She quit the movement earlier this year when she felt that her cries of alarm kept falling on deaf ears; I never left.). Audio recording (35 min). Transcript.
Media histrionics are justified against a deranged Trump
Here, I explain why juries should disregard the law. *
Saturday, October 26
Writing is like exercise. It’s just good on so many levels. Writing can be high impactWriting can be inspiringWriting can help you learn and growWriting can help your careerWriting can be meaningful and deeply satisfyingWriting can get you into flowAnd also, just like with exercise, almost nobody writes enough Whenever I get back into the habit of writing, I always think I should write more.
Sweepcash competition, Institutional partners wanted, deals, and new markets
TL;DR: We’re announcing Kairos, a new AI safety fieldbuilding organization focused on the early career talent pipeline. We’re the new home for two programs:FSP, which provides semester-based mentorship for organizers of AI safety university groups. SPAR, a program that pairs early career individuals to work on three-month AI safety research projects alongside experienced mentors. .
I’ve rescued an amazing old book: “ The End of the World” (1930) by Geoffrey Dennis. It’s interwar pop-science in the form of a sermon (the best sermon you’ve ever heard). Flourish of nominal trumpets over, real arguments enter the field.
. . It’s very early for a study of existential risk.
I actually haven’t seen anyone write down my favourite things about running a company: You get to choose what you work on 1 (equivalent value to me, $300k). You get to choose everyone you work with ($200k). No boss ($50k). Refuse or cancel most projects or meetings at any time 2 ($50k). Subcontracting at will ($50k).
Key points. We surveyed UK respondents, asking them to list (without prompting) the three factors they thought most likely to cause human extinction in the next 100 years. We estimate AI risk to be reported by 9% of British adults, at a similar level to Natural disasters (10%).
A giant squid has washed up on a beach in Northern Spain.
Blog moderation policy.
Over the last day, I did two sets of polls comparing 16 cultural drift scenarios (detailed here) re their likelihood and desirability. (I later added influence.). Here are best fit priorities (relative to 100 max), sorted by priority sum:
Friday, October 25
The post What are experts in biosecurity worried about? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
New research provides evidence for assessing the mental experiences of wild horses. Could the same techniques apply to other species?. The post Scientifically Validating Welfare Indicators For Free-Roaming Horses appeared first on Faunalytics.
“As long as someone’s memories and personality are intact, the person has not truly died… If we can preserve that information, their identity could theoretically continue.”...
Researchers at Google have developed a watermark for LLM-generated text. The basics are pretty obvious: the LLM chooses between tokens partly based on a cryptographic key, and someone with knowledge of the key can detect those choices. What makes this hard is (1) how much text is required for the watermark to work, and (2) how robust the watermark is to post-generation editing.
Andrea Miotti joins the podcast to discuss "A Narrow Path" — a roadmap to safe, transformative AI. We talk about our current inability to precisely predict future AI capabilities, the dangers of self-improving and unbounded AI systems, how humanity might coordinate globally to ensure safe AI development, and what a mature science of intelligence would look like.
Read all about how your advocacy work has taken us across the country to conferences, committee events and MP discussions.
When it comes to infectious diseases, the mosquitos are winning. In the last year, health officials reported a spike in dengue and have recorded infections even in nontropical areas, where the disease typically did not spread. Malaria is resurging in parts of North and South America, Africa, and Asia. Even Anthony Fauci, the former director […]...
Sergei Korolev was the secret architect of the Soviet space program. His career demonstrates the triumph of vision and institutional innovation over conventionality and bureaucracy. The post The Genius Who Launched the First Space Program
appeared first on Palladium.
Who’s going to win the presidential election? My answer, as a journalist writing about politics who gets asked this a lot, is always, “It’s a coin flip.” That’s certainly what forecasting models based on polling suggest. As I write this, the Economist gives Donald Trump a 53 percent chance; FiveThirtyEight gives him a 51 percent […]...
Speaker. Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston is a neuroscientist at Monash University, Australia, where he investigates methods for characterising the nature of conscious experiences. In 2019, he obtained his PhD from The University of Melbourne, where he researched how genetic and environmental factors affect cognition.
We just published an interview: Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do. Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts. Episode summary.
New Team at EACH! + Retreat Highlights
Get to know the new team at EA Switzerland and see highlights from our last retreat. View this email in your browser
. Hey <<First Name>>,
Welcome to this month's update! To bring you closer to the community, you can: Sign up to EA Switzerland here and join our Slack from there if you haven't already.
I am honored to share that I recently received the 2024 Emerging Health Technologies Media Award by HealthTech Africa for my work on “Emerging Technologies for Malaria Eradication.” This recognition is not just a personal achievement; it highlights the potential of science communication in addressing significant global challenges, particularly in the realm of public health […].
GiveWell’s mission is to find the charities that deliver the greatest impact per dollar spent to help donors decide where to give. To support this, they publish forecasts on expected grant outcomes. Now, Metaculus and GiveWell invite you to forecast and share your reasoning to help GiveWell help others. Get started and provide feedback on GiveWell's funding decisions.
→ TL;DR: 10+ years experience in tech, operations and management - please pitch me why and how I can best help your org/project. 😊. Hi everyone,. I have the rare opportunity to spend the next several months on whatever seems to be the most impactful thing for me to do. So I'm looking for your ideas and help in finding that. The requirements are: 100% remote possible from Germany.
New Harvest and Vireo Advisors are launching a cultured meat safety working session series for 2024-2025 to formally kick off Phase 3 of the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI)! Funded by the US National Science Foundation, the working sessions aim to foster collaboration amongst individuals interested in actively working on or advising cultured meat and […].
Coherent strategies for a hypercapable world call for coherent scenarios. Incoherence could be lethal.
It’s been a few months since our last update. In addition to preparing for a big Giving Season event, here are some of the things we’ve been up to. Site improvements. Notifications re-redesign. After evaluating the feedback we received from our notifications redesign earlier this year, we decided to overhaul the UI again.
You may have heard the claim that people who are unskilled in a particular domain overestimate their ability in that domain. They don't...
TL;DR: In our recent work with Professor Michael Graziano (arXiv, thread), we show that adding an auxiliary self-modeling objective to supervised learning tasks yields simpler, more regularized, and more parameter-efficient models. Across three classification tasks and two modalities, self-modeling consistently reduced complexity (lower RLCT, narrower weight distribution).
They are the best tool we have to reduce the burden of AI regulation
Earlier this summer, the United Nations reported that humanity now consumes more fish raised in farms than taken from the ocean. The milestone was the culmination of a decades-long growth spurt in aquaculture, or fish farming, an industry that produces more than four times as much fish today than it did 30 years ago. Fish […]...
Direct action when abortion was illegal
Research shows a gap between citizens’ attitudes towards animal welfare and their consumer behavior. What does this gap look like in the Chinese context, and how can we address it?. The post Animal Welfare’s ‘Consumer-Citizen Gap’ in China appeared first on Faunalytics.
Thursday, October 24
This is the full text of a post from " The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race for Machine Superintelligence. OpenAI is disbanding its AGI readiness team — and its Senior Advisor for AGI...
This document provides an overview of research on the efficacy of aquatic animal stunning, a widely supported intervention among aquatic animal welfare advocates to reduce pain during slaughter. It offers a brief introduction to electrical stunning, the methods used to assess consciousness, and academic perspectives on its effectiveness.
Lafiya Nigeria commissioned Rethink Priorities to conduct a detailed cost-effectiveness analysis of its intervention. It trains women health workers to provide family planning counseling and distribute an injectable contraceptive called Sayana Press in remote parts of rural northern Nigeria.
Miles Brundage was one of the last of the AI safety old guard at OpenAI. He thinks the world is not ready for powerful AI.
Just download the app and subscribe to me. At 7 PM Pacific you'll see the live video front & center in the app.
Funding circles represent a simple yet powerful way to improve donor coordination across cause areas. We at AIM Grantmaking have recently published a Funding Circles Guide, explaining when they can be useful, what constitutes a good funding circle, and how to start one. Who this is for: We invite funders to have a read and consider joining an existing circle or setting one up in their...
The post Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
EA Forum Digest #212
Hello!. Hello,
We have just announced our plans for Giving Season 2024. We’ll be running a donation election (like last year), and a number of themed weeks. The first weekly theme will be funding diversification. We’d love for you to write something for the week, and pitch it to friends who you think have ideas worth sharing.
An advocacy groups is filing a Fourth Amendment challenge against automatic license plate readers.
“The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move.
We are launching an independent research lab that builds open, scalable technology for understanding AI systems and steering them in the public interest. Transluce means to shine light through something to reveal its structure. Today’s complex AI systems are difficult to understand—not even experts can reliably.
Thanks to Holden Karnofsky, David Duvenaud, and Kate Woolverton for useful discussions and feedback. Following up on our recent “ Sabotage Evaluations for Frontier Models” paper, I wanted to share more of my personal thoughts on why I think catastrophic sabotage is important and why I care about it as a threat model.
This post includes a "flattened version" of an interactive diagram that cannot be displayed on this site. I recommend reading the original version of the post with the interactive diagram, which can be found here.
Over the last few months, ARC has released a number of pieces of research.
Many intellectuals, and intellectual wannabes, would, if pressed accept that UFOs seem sufficiently puzzling to justify more careful study.
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