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EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts and posts with 125 karma. If you"d like more episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (All audio)" podcast instead.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

3:13

[Linkpost] “Alvea Wind Down Announcement [Official]”...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/11/01

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

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6:08

[Linkpost] “President Biden Issues Executive Order on...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/30

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

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11:50

“We’re Not Ready: thoughts on ‘pausing’ and...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/27

Views are my own, not Open Philanthropy's. I am married to the President of Anthropic and have a financial interest in both Anthropic and OpenAI via my spouse. Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to help out with efforts to get responsible scaling policies adopted. In that context, a number of people have said it would be helpful for me to be publicly explicit about whether I’m in favor of an AI pause. This post will give some thoughts on these topics. I think

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9:17

“Impact Evaluation in EA” by callum

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/26

SummaryGiven EA's history and values, I’d have expected for impact evaluation to be a distinguishing feature of the movement. In fact, impact evaluation seems fairly rare in the EA space.There are some things specific actors could do for EA to get more of the benefits of impact evaluation. For example, organisations that don’t already could carry out evaluations of their impact, and a well-suited individual could start an organisation to carry out impact evaluations and analysis of the EA

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36:22

“How bad would human extinction be?” by arvomm

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/26

Figure 1 (see full caption below)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 maximisation for cause prioritisation; second, to evaluate the claim that a commitment to expected value maximisation robustly supports the conclusion that we ought to prioritise existential risk mitigation over all else.Executive

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11:23

“Thoughts on responsible scaling policies and...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/24

I am excited about AI developers implementing responsible scaling policies; I’ve recently been spending time refining this idea and advocating for it. Most people I talk to are excited about RSPs, but there is also some uncertainty and pushback about how they relate to regulation. In this post I’ll explain my views on that:I think that sufficiently good responsible scaling policies could dramatically reduce risk, and that preliminary policies likeAnthropic's RSP meaningfully reduce risk by creating

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3:42

[Linkpost] “Pausing AI might be good policy, but it’s...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/23

NIMBYs don’t call themselves NIMBYs. They call themselves affordable housing advocates or community representatives or environmental campaigners. They’re usually not against building houses. They just want to make sure that those houses are affordable, attractive to existing residents, and don’t destroy habitat for birds and stuff.Who can argue with that? If, ultimately, those demands stop houses from being built entirely, well, that's because developers couldn’t find a way to build them without

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11:10

“Presenting: 2023 Incubated Charities (Round 2) -...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/19

After launching our first batch of 2023 charities in April, we are now thrilled to announce the launch of four new nonprofit organizations through our July/August 2023 Incubation Program. The 2023 Round 2 incubated charities are:Clear Solutions - Providing treatment for young children to prevent deaths from diarrhoeal diseases.Lafiya Nigeria - Reducing maternal mortality by providing safe family planning options in rural northern Nigeria.Alliance for Reducing Microbial Resistance - Supporting

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32:43

“How has FTX’s collapse impacted EA?” by...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/17

Summary of FindingsIt has been almost a year since FTX went bankrupt on November 11, 2022. Some of the ways that has impacted EA have been obvious, like the shuttering of the FTX Foundation, expected to be one of the biggest EA funders. But recent discussions show that the broader impact of the FTX scandal on EA isn’t well understood, and that there is a desire for more empirical evidence on this topic. To that end, I have aggregated a variety of publicly available EA metrics to improve the evidence

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48:29

“The Risks and Rewards of Prioritizing Animals of...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/16

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.SummaryExpected value (EV) maximization is a

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12:24

“Cash and FX management for EA organizations” by JueYan

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/14

I’m a grantmaker who previously spent a decade as a professional investor. I’ve recently helped some Open Phil, GiveWell, and Survival and Flourishing Fund grantees with their cash and foreign exchange (FX) management. In the EA community, we seem collectively quite bad at this. My aim with this post is to help others 80/20 their cash and FX management: for 20% of the effort (these 4 items below), we can capture 80% of the benefit of corporate best practices. This will often be a highly impactful

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10:51

“Chuck Feeney (1931–2023)” by finm

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/11

Philanthropist Chuck Feeney died on October 9, at 92. He founded one of the largest private charitable foundations in history, giving away his entire fortune within his lifetime. He was almost obsessively secretive in his giving, and set a standard of seriousness which inspired the Giving Pledge and many of its pledgers.Feeney was born at the tail end of the Great Depression into modest circumstances, raised by blue-collar Irish-American parents, and became the first of his family to attend

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26:49

[Linkpost] “Pause For Thought: The AI Pause Debate”...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/10

Crosspost from Astral Codex Ten. I.Last month, Ben West of the Center for Effective Altruism hosted a debate among long-termists, forecasters, and x-risk activists about pausing AI.Everyone involved thought AI was dangerous and might even destroy the world, so you might expect a pause - maybe even a full stop - would be a no-brainer. It wasn’t. Participants couldn’t agree on basics of what they meant by “pause”, whether it was possible, or whether it would make things better or worse.There was at

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15:15

“Our planned allocation to GiveWell’s recommendations...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/06

Last year, we committed $350 million to GiveWell's evidence-backed, cost-effective recommendations in global health and development.This year, we’re committing $300M to support GiveWell's recommendations over the next three years. This returns our annual support to its 2020 level ($100M/year). And it brings us to more than $1 billion in funding for GiveWell's recommendations over the course of Open Philanthropy's existence.We’re committing all of this funding now, but we anticipate that GiveWell

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7:32

“Potentially actionable opportunity: eliminating the...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/06

In the latest episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast, Kevin Esvelt talks about the New World screwworm. He claims that there is a potential for a massive animal welfare win, if we can eliminate this parasite. This feels worthy of a discussion, so I'm starting this thread. Is this issue on anyone's radar? Has anyone looked into these claims? They seem potentially important/actionable, if true! Relevant section from the podcast:Kevin Esvelt: [...] the New World screwworm, which has the amazing scientific

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118:49

“Party Politics for Animal Advocacy: Part 1:...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/06

Key PointsAnimal parties are minor (niche) political parties with a single-issue focus on animals.Animal parties can win seats in elections that use proportional representation. The most important strategic decision is to choose to contest elections where seats can be won with just a couple of percent of the vote. Animal parties have won seats in five countries (Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal).When an animal party wins even one seat or a couple of seats, the impact for animals

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28:44

“Observations on the funding landscape of EA and AI...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/02

Epistemic status: Hot takes for discussion. These observations are a side product of another strategy project, rather than a systematic and rigorous analysis of the funding landscape, and we may be missing important considerations. Observations are also non-exhaustive and mostly come from anecdotal data and EA Forum posts. We haven’t vetted the resources that we are citing; instead, we took numerous data points at face value and asked for feedback from >5 people who have more of an inside view

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19:10

“Violence Before Agriculture” by John G. Halstead,...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/10/02

This is a summary of a report on trends in violence since the dawn of humanity: from the hunter-gatherer period to the present day.[1] The full report is available at this Substack and as a preprint on SSRN.[2] Phil did 95% of the work on the report. Expert reviewers provided the following comments on our report.“Thomson and Halstead have provided an admirably thorough and fair assessment of this difficult and emotionally fraught empirical question. I don’t agree with all of their conclusions, but

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12:46

[Linkpost] “Why I’m still going out to bat for the EA...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/09/30

This is a link post. From the looks of it, next week might be rough for people who care about Effective Altruism. As CEA acting CEO Ben West pointed out on the forum: “Sam Bankman-Fried's trial is scheduled to start October 3, 2023, and Michael Lewis's book about FTX comes out the same day. My hope and expectation is that neither will be focused on EA … Nonetheless, I think there's a decent chance that viewing the Forum, Twitter, or news media could become stressful for some people, and you may want

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12:47

[Linkpost] “Why I’m still going out to bat for the EA...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/09/30

This is a link post. From the looks of it, next week might be rough for people who care about Effective Altruism. As CEA acting CEO Ben West pointed out on the forum: “Sam Bankman-Fried's trial is scheduled to start October 3, 2023, and Michael Lewis's book about FTX comes out the same day. My hope and expectation is that neither will be focused on EA … Nonetheless, I think there's a decent chance that viewing the Forum, Twitter, or news media could become stressful for some people, and you may want

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302 results

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