This is a linkpost for @Tyrone-Jay Barugh 's post for people outside of the US who are interested in careers doing good within the United States. In 2022, he recommended that people within that demographic (people without US residency or citizenship interested in careers doing good within the United States, e.g., with Global Development or AI Safety Technical or Policy work) take advantage of...
Sunday, October 13
this week in security — october 13 edition
US investigating Salt Typhoon hacks, Internet Archive breached, Qualcomm zero-day under attack, and more. ~this week in security~. a cybersecurity newsletter by @zackwhittaker
volume 7, issue 38
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THIS WEEK, TL;DR. U.S. officials race to understand severity of China's recent...
Discuss...
Haecceities, for the record, are a philosophical concept, not a kind of spell
And how having a baby can make you believe in the future
Open Philanthropy has generously supported the animal welfare field for an extended period of time, enabling the success of corporate campaigns, the creation of numerous new initiatives unlikely to succeed without this funding, and the establishment of animal advocacy more into the mainstream in the EA.
TL;DR: Steering vectors provide evidence that linear directions in LLMs are interpretable. Since SAEs decompose linear directions, they should be able to interpret steering vectors. We apply the gradient pursuit algorithm suggested by Smith et al to decompose steering vectors, and find that they contain many interpretable and promising-looking features.
This post starts out pretty gloomy but ends up with some points that I feel pretty positive about. Day to day, I'm more focussed on the positive points, but awareness of the negative has been crucial to forming my priorities, so I'm going to start with those.
Saturday, October 12
I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all.
Holly Elmore writes about the costs of criticism. One of the most salient things to me here is that criticism disincentivises transparency: people are 'punished' when they are transparent while equal transgressions by people who are not transparent 'go unpunished'. I want to call out instances of transparency and celebrate them.
When you think of what makes us human, would you say it’s our powers of prediction? I probably wouldn’t have, at least not until my conversation with Mark Miller, a philosopher of cognition and research fellow at both the University of Toronto and Monash University in Melbourne. He studies how new ideas about the mind […]...
Incentives and selection effects
Is this market really only at 63%? I think you should take the over. Only 63%? I think you should take the over.Five tiers of rigor for safety-oriented interpretability work. Lately, I have been thinking of interpretability research as falling into five different tiers of rigor. 1. Pontification.
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Scott Alexander once wrote: David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process. If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I.
Disclaimer: I work at EA animal welfare organisations but this piece reflects my personal views, not the views of the organisations I am involved with. I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of support for animal welfare in this debate.
Governor Gavin Newsom killed the bill, but the fight over it sketches a blueprint for the AI safety battles to come
Fishermen in Tamil Nadu are reporting smaller catches of squid.
Blog moderation policy.
In July, I wrote about my new book project on AI and democracy, to be published by MIT Press in fall 2025. My co-author and collaborator Nathan Sanders and I are hard at work writing.
At this point, we would like feedback on titles. Here are four possibilities:
A 3-part live lecture series feat. Sarah Paine. Reserve your tickets today.
On September 12, 2024, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity hosted a launch event for Enhancing Cybersecurity Resilience for Transnational Dissidents, a report authored by researchers from Citizen Lab,…. The post Enhancing Cybersecurity Resilience for Transnational Dissidents appeared first on CLTC.
tl;dr: No.
Anders Sandberg's research centres on estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies, methods of reasoning about long-term futures, existential and global catastrophic risk, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), as well as societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement.
ABOUT NEW ROOTS INSTITUTE. What do we do?. New Roots Institute is a growing nonprofit that educates people across the country on factory farming’s devastating impacts on people, animals, and the planet, and empowers them to advocate for systemic change in their communities. Our approach is designed to build significant and lasting capacity for the movement to end factory farming.
Peter Kyle on the UK AI Bill, OpenAI’s cost projections, and AI takes over the Nobel Prizes.
Big banks are top lenders to the industrial animal agriculture sector. If they want to follow through on their climate commitments, they must divest from the industry. The post Is Funding From Industrial Agriculture Sabotaging U.S. Banks’ Climate Commitments? appeared first on Faunalytics.
What does US policy change look like under each of the candidates?
EA Nigeria Summit was the first EA-related conference in Nigeria, and it took place from September 6th to 7th, 2024. The event saw a higher level of interest than we (the organisers) expected. We received applications from individuals across Nigeria and the international community, especially Africans. We accepted 170 applicants for the summit, and a total of 136 participants attended the event.
I really appreciate the RP Moral Weights Project and before I say anything I’d like to thank the amazing RP crew for their extremely thoughtful and kind responses to this critique. Because of their great response I feel a little uncomfortable even publishing this, as I respect both the project and the integrity of the researchers.
I really appreciate the RP Moral Weights Project and before I say anything I’d like to thank the amazing RP crew for their extremely thoughtful and kind responses to this critique. Because of their great response I feel a little uncomfortable even publishing this, as I respect both the project and the integrity of the researchers.
AI companies are on a mission to radically change our world. They’re working on building machines that could outstrip human intelligence and unleash a dramatic economic transformation on us all. Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has basically told us he’s trying to build a god — or “magic intelligence in the sky,” as he […]...
Saturday, October 12
Tamay Besiroglu joins the podcast to discuss scaling, AI capabilities in 2030, breakthroughs in AI agents and planning, automating work, the uncertainties of investing in AI, and scaling laws for inference-time compute. Here's the report we discuss in the episode:
https://epochai.org/blog/can-ai-scaling-continue-through-2030
Timestamps:
00:00 How important is scaling?
After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA (and US CyberCommand), Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me.
I really loved this quick take from Lizka, especially this part: At the same time, trying to actually do anything is really hard. Appreciation for doers is often undersupplied. Being in leadership positions or engaging in public discussions is a valuable service, but opens you up to a lot of (often stressful) criticism, which acts as a disincentive for being public.
In summary, there are two important reasons why I believe it's more important to direct additional resources towards animal welfare over global health: Global health and human welfare are generally improving whilst animal suffering is getting worse at a worrying (and potentially accelerating) rate. For factory farming, the default is it gets worse and worse over the next 50 years.
11 October 2024 The war in Gaza has been going on for a year with catastrophic loss of human lives … More...
Many such criticisms
This is a cross-post from my Substack, where I don't assume much background knowledge on AI safety and trends. . I feel like I live in two different worlds sometimes. In one world, the next decade will be... normal. Sure, I’ll see the world change, but it will change in familiar ways.
The Canary Islands rejected a proposal for the world’s first commercial octopus farm, claiming the company failed to address its environmental impacts. This report highlights the significant flaws in the farm’s plans. The post Proposed Octopus Farm Fails Environmental Impact Assessment appeared first on Faunalytics.
The post Anonymous answers: could advances in AI supercharge biorisk? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
We’ve got some exciting news: The Ultimate Personality Test just got a major upgrade! It will analyze your personality using all three...
I wish I knew! But here are some speculative recommendations
One of the major challenges in animal welfare economics is estimating an appropriate animal welfare tax on meat that accounts for the external costs of suffering of farmed animals. Here I present my tentative best guesses. I estimate an animal … Lees verder →...
One strategy for mitigating risk from schemers (that is, egregiously misaligned models that intentionally try to subvert your safety measures) is behavioral red-teaming (BRT). The basic version of this strategy is something like: Before you deploy your model, but after you train it, you search really hard for inputs on which the model takes actions that are very bad.
The Future of Life Institute would like to congratulate John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in […]...
Thursday, October 10
Most people know Sonoma County, the Northern California region sometimes called America’s Provence, for its lush vineyards, Mediterranean-style villas, and farm-to-table restaurants. But when I traveled to wine country last year, it was to observe a side of Sonoma that few outsiders know about: a dead-of-night animal rights protest at an industrial chicken slaughterhouse, located […]...
A discussion I have with myself a lot. The post Inner dialogue, walking down the sidewalk appeared first on Otherwise.
Editors’ Note: Damon Circosta and Kristin A. Goss celebrate the philanthropic legacy of Joel Fleishman, their colleague at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, who passed away on September 30, 2024. Photo credit: Chris Hildreth for Duke University. Joel Lawrence Fleishman, a towering figure in the world of philanthropy, public policy, and higher education, … Continue reading →...
For many years, I devoted myself to improving human health and wellbeing. But then I shifted to working to prevent suffering for animals. In this post, I will briefly share some considerations that pushed me to make this change... . Violence. The phrase ‘animal welfare’ can sound pretty calm and gentle.
CEO Dr Ben Sturgeon shares his thoughts on 'workplace mental health' on World Mental Health Day.
An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs.
Ecovacs’s privacy policy— available elsewhere in the app—allows for blanket collection of user data for research purposes, including:
Vision care is out of reach for many children and families across the United States because it is too expensive or difficult to access. As many as 4 million children and 12 million adults in the US are living with impaired vision due to an uncorrected refractive error. Without clear vision, children may struggle to […].
October 10, 2024
When most people hear about research into mosquitoes, they see it as fascinating. Today, I wish to delve into an innovative study by Target Malaria Ghana, which aims to shed light on one of Africa’s most pressing public health issues—malaria transmission. If you have been wondering how scientists unravel the secrets of these tiny, yet […].
A guide to understanding the Living Planet Index and what it does and doesn’t mean.
A book review and an audit
Thanks to Evan Hubinger for funding this project and for introducing me to predictive models, Johannes Treutlein for many fruitful discussions on related topics, and Dan Valentine for providing valuable feedback on my code implementation.
Across low-and-middle-income countries, less than half of 10-year-old children can read. This alarming phenomenon has been labelled by education experts around the world as the global ‘learning crisis’: A bitter-sweet situation in which we have achieved near universal primary education, including gender parity, but in which children are not achieving sufficient mastery of basic literacy ….
Tomorrow is World Mental Health Day, and in many ways, it seems like the world has made great strides in mental health care. In 2023 alone, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) poured $1.25 billion into research studying how mental illness manifests in the brain. People are prescribed more psychiatric drugs now than ever, […]...
Why I Still Think AW >> GH At The Margin. Last year, I argued that Open Phil (OP) should allocate a majority of its neartermist resources to animal welfare (AW) rather than global health (GH). Most of the critical comments still agreed that AW > GH at the margin:
At the beginning of the millennium, Gil L’Italien—an epidemiologist based in New Haven, Connecticut—was looking for ways to give back. His three sons were grown, and after the horror of 9/11 he wanted to spend his free time in two positive ways: By making charitable contributions and by being a friend to those in need. … Continued.
Many have noticed a key time coincidence.
This post is an attempt to analyze the feasibility of establishing an international pause on frontier AI development. More specifically, it highlights a few reasons why someone might consider pausing to be a viable component of AI safety strategy. Summary:
Wednesday, October 9
Welcome to the October 9, 2024 Main edition of The Homework, the official newsletter of California YIMBY — legislative updates, news clips, housing research and analysis, and the latest writings from the California YIMBY team. News from Sacramento Victory alert!…. The post The HomeWork: October <span class="dewidow">9, 2024</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
For decades, animal advocates have worked to advocate for farmed animals. But what if one of the most — if not the most — numerous farmed species on the planet has been overlooked? . The post Three Numbers That Make The Case For Shrimp Welfare appeared first on Faunalytics.
This study investigated the effects of displaying vegan food as a default — rather than side-by-side with a meat option — in university cafeterias. The post How Food Displays Can Change Dining Practices appeared first on Faunalytics.
EA Forum Digest #210
Hello!. The big news this week is the Animal Welfare vs Global Health debate week which is happening on the Forum, ending on the 13th. Make sure to get your (purely symbolic) votes in by then and contribute to the discussion. Also, the application deadline for EA Global Boston is coming up on the 20th October. You can apply here.
A man has just robbed a train.
There seems to be movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions. Here are some ways I can see this going badly: 1. Resistance against being told what to do. People hate being told what to do. Most of the top global health interventions aren't imposed (and probably shouldn't be, because that leads to backlash).
Two students have created a demo of a smart-glasses app that performs automatic facial recognition and then information lookups. Kind of obvious, but the sort of creepy demo that gets attention.
News article.
As the world becomes more conscious of ethical choices, Tech Mahindra Ltd., a global IT giant, has actively supported the movement to reduce animal suffering. By participating in Vegan Outreach’s campaign, the Green Tuesday Initiative, Tech Mahindra has made significant strides in promoting plant-based food options. Institutions play a crucial role in this mission, as […].
A guest post by Daniel Böttger...
De paus zei dat artsen die een abortus uitvoeren ‘huurmoordenaars’ zijn. Volgens Tom Naegels is dat vergelijkbaar met een dierenrechtenactivist die ‘vlees is moord’ roept. Dat is een interessante stelling waar we onze morele waarden eens mee kunnen aftoetsen. Op … Lees verder →...
Government of Karnataka partners with J-PAL South Asia to accelerate and scale policy innovations in school education
The partnership with J-PAL South Asia underscores the Department of School Education and Literacy's strategic, evidence-based approach to strengthen policies. dakshta@povert…
Wed, 10/09/2024 - 04:02...
This election isn’t just about votes—it’s about who controls the world’s most powerful weapons. In this season of NukeTalk, we will explore The Nuclear Ballot: How the U.S. Election Shapes Nuclear Policy. We bring you insights from top nuclear weapons experts on how this election can shape nuclear weapons policy in the future as stakes rise in this election cycle.
If you substantially changed your mind on this issue (e.g. flip the sign, or move towards a more/less extreme position), how would your actions change?. If the specific wording of the debate topic isn't a crux for you on anything important, I'd be interested in what your actual cruxes are (as opposed to anchoring on the specific wording of the debate). Feel free to add caveats and constraints...
"I shall nevertheless make an effort and follow anew the same path as that on which I yesterday entered, i.e. I shall proceed by setting aside all that in which the least doubt could be supposed..."
The Animal Welfare vs Global Health debate week is turning out to be pretty one sided so far. The wording of the question this time was chosen to be a bit more resistant to nitpicks (vs "...should be an EA priority" last time), potentially this has also resulted in it appearing more polarised one way.
This is my contribution to the animal welfare vs. global health debate week. Thank you to Felix Werdermann, Helene Kortschak, and Vasco Grilo for their feedback. TL;DR: I think there's significant uncertainty about whether most sentient lives, human or non-human, are truly "net positive" - meaning their positive experiences outweigh their negative ones.
An attempt to distill down the whole “Otherness and control” series into a single talk.
Playing Schelling games is a key dangerous capability for schemers: it’s much harder to control AIs that are very capable at Schelling coordination. In this post, I discuss the threat model and describe concrete projects for empirical work... . Suppose you wish to control models that adversarially try to cause a catastrophic outcome (“schemers”).
This piece was originally published by American University. Your can read the full article on their website. Washington, D.C. (October 8, 2024) – American University honored cybersecurity leader…. The post American University Honors Ann Cleaveland for Commitment in Inclusivity in Technology Policy appeared first on CLTC.
In California, legislation to streamline housing production and to fund the construction of deed-restricted affordable housing often requires builders to pay “prevailing wages” to the construction workers who work on the resulting project. These requirements are based on the idea….
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