EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

The two podcasts where I discuss FTX are now out:

Making Sense with Sam Harris Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

The Sam Harris podcast is more aimed at a general audience; the Spencer Greenberg podcast is more aimed at people already familiar with EA. (I’ve also done another podcast with Chris Anderson from TED that will come out next month, but FTX is a fairly small part of that conversation.)

In this post, I’ll gather together some things I talk about across these podcasts — this includes updates and lessons, and responses to some questi...

Anders Sandberg has written a “final report” released simultaneously with the announcement of FHI's closure. The abstract and an excerpt follow.

Normally manifestos are written first, and then hopefully stimulate actors to implement their vision. This document is the reverse: an epitaph summarizing what the Future of Humanity Institute was, what we did and why, what we learned, and what we think comes next. It can be seen as an oral history of FHI from some of its members. It will not be unbiased, nor complete, but hopefully a useful historical source. I have received input from othe...

Author: Sam Hilton, AIM Director of Research

In March 2021 I received an odd letter. It was from a guy I didn't know, David Quarrey, the UK's National Security Advisor. The letter thanked me for providing external expertise to the UK government's Integrated Review, which had been published that morning. It turns out that the Integrated Review has made a public commitment to "review our approach to risk assessment" ... "including how we account for interdependencies, cascading and compound risks". This is something I'd been advocating for over the previous few months by writing a policy paper and engaging...

In the aftermath of SBF's convinction, there have been a few posts trying to make sense of FTX. Some people are trying to figure out what happened, and some people are interested in trying to find clever defenses.

I'm in a much more boring position: I am confident SBF is the fraud the world believes him to be. I hope this post can provide reasoning transparency on why I think this, and perhaps serve as an easy link for others who feel similarly but don't want to get bogged down in a point-by-point.

Posted anonymously...

Thanks to Eli Lifland, Molly Hickman, Değer Turan, and Evan Miyazono for reviewing drafts of this post. The opinions expressed here are my own.

Summary:

Forecasters produce reasons and models that are often more valuable than the final forecasts Most of this value is being lost due to the historical practice & incentives of forecasting, and the difficulty of crowds to “adversarially collaborate”  FutureSearch is a forecasting system with legible reasons and models at its core (examples at the end)

The Curious Case of the Missing Reasoning

Ben Landau-Taylor of Bismarck Analysis wrote a piec...

Here in the UK, the government is consulting on mandatory animal welfare labelling (closing 7 May 2024). People may wish to respond if they want to express their support or share thoughts and evidence that could shape the outcomes.

I think such labelling has the potential to significantly improve animal welfare, not just through changing individual choices but by encouraging companies to stop selling the lowest welfare tiers entirely, and through raising labelling standards over time. Higher standards will probably also mean higher prices, lower consumption and 'fairer' competition with alternative proteins. What happens in the UK may also...

Is anyone in the world being paid to do an independent investigation of how EA handled Sam Bankman-Fried, with respect to "did we screw up" and "is there stuff we should do differently going forward"?

Last I heard, literally nobody was doing this and at least some EA leaders were mostly just hoping that SBF gets memoryholed — but maybe I'm out of the loop?

My understanding is that Effective Ventures completed a narrow investigation into this topic in mid-2023, purely looking at legal risk to EV and not at all trying to do a general po...

A brief and belated update: When I resigned from the board of EV US last year, I was planning on writing about that decision. But I ultimately decided against doing that for a variety of reasons, including that it was very costly to me, and I believed it wouldn’t make a difference. However, I want to make it clear that I resigned last year due to significant disagreements with the board of EV and EA leadership, particularly concerning their actions leading up to and after the FTX crisis.

While I certainly support the boards’ decision to pay...

Following the success of Draft Amnesty Week, the Forum team have decided to take things a bit further.

April 2nd 2024 will be Mandatory Amnesty Day (aka MAD).

At 09:00 UTC, all draft posts on your Forum account will be posted live on the Forum.

All the posts in this section on your profile page deserve to be seen. 

If you have used our Google Docs import feature, all posts we detect on your Google account will also be posted.

Shrek is now the de facto mascot of Draft Amnesty. 

If, for some re...

Impactful Animal Advocacy is thrilled to announce that after careful consideration and complex moral calculations, we have decided to rebrand to Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy.

Why shrimp, you ask? Well, we've crunched the numbers and determined that improving the welfare of shrimp is one of the highest-impact opportunities in the animal advocacy space.

  

Source: https://foodimpacts.org/

In light of this strong evidence, Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy will be laser-focusing all of our efforts and resources on ending the suffering of our shrimpy friends.

This includes revamping our programs to focus on our ne...