EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular‪)‬ EA Forum Team

We’re excited to share a new addition to our site: an impact-focused job board!
We’ve considered launching a job board for some time, so we’re happy to add this feature to the Probably Good site. The job board aims to:
Help people find more promising job opportunities, including in cause areas that aren’t as thoroughly covered by other impact-focused boards such as 80,000 Hours and Animal Advocacy Careers. Direct our audience to concrete opportunities that meet a high standard of impact. Reduce friction for people on our site to take the first step towards a career change, by providing opportunities to apply for or just exposing them to new options. As Animal Advocacy Careers have highlighted before, job boards are often the primary gateway to career advice sites, and so we hope the job board will also extend our content's reach and general impact.
Why we’re launching a job [...]
---
Outline:
(00:59) Why we’re launching a job board
(02:34) How you can help
(03:09) Final Notes
---

First published:

May 6th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZPB87ayzzwAoxycvN/probably-good-launched-a-new-job-board

---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

GPT-5 training is probably starting around now. It seems very unlikely that GPT-5 will cause the end of the world. But it's hard to be sure. I would guess that GPT-5 is more likely to kill me than an asteroid, a supervolcano, a plane crash or a brain tumor. We can predict fairly well what the cross-entropy loss will be, but pretty much nothing else.
Maybe we will suddenly discover that the difference between GPT-4 and superhuman level is actually quite small. Maybe GPT-5 will be extremely good at interpretability, such that it can recursively self improve by rewriting its own weights.
Hopefully model evaluations can catch catastrophic risks before wide deployment, but again, it's hard to be sure. GPT-5 could plausibly be devious enough so circumvent all of our black-box testing. Or it may be that it's too late as soon as the model has been trained. These [...]
---
Outline:
(01:10) How do we do better for GPT-6?
(02:02) Plan B: Mass protests against AI
(03:06) No innovation required
(04:36) The discomfort of doing something weird
(05:53) Preparing for the moment
---

First published:

April 30th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/J8sw7o5mWbGFaBW4o/why-i-m-doing-pauseai

---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Around the end of Feb 2024 I attended the Summit on Existential Risk and EAG: Bay Area (GCRs), during which I did 25+ one-on-ones about the needs and gaps in the EA-adjacent catastrophic risk landscape, and how they’ve changed.
The meetings were mostly with senior managers or researchers in the field who I think are worth listening to (unfortunately I can’t share names). Below is how I’d summarise the main themes in what was said.
If you have different impressions of the landscape, I’d be keen to hear them.
There's been a big increase in the number of people working on AI safety, partly driven by a reallocation of effort (e.g. Rethink Priorities starting an AI policy think tank); and partly driven by new people entering the field after its newfound prominence. Allocation in the landscape seems more efficient than in the past – it's harder to identify [...] ---

First published:

May 6th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YDjH6ACPZq889tqeJ/updates-on-the-ea-catastrophic-risk-landscape

---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Latest Draft Here
Abstract.
Here, I present GDP (per capita) forecasts of major economies until 2050. Since GDP per capita is the best generalized predictor of many important variables, such as welfare, GDP forecasts can give us a more concrete picture of what the world might look like in just 27 years. The key claim here is: even if AI does not cause transformative growth, our business-as-usual near-future is still surprisingly different from today.
Results
In recent history, we've seen unprecedented economic growth and rises in living standards.
Consider this graph:[1]

How will living standards improve as GDP per capita (GDP/cap) rises? Here, I show data that projects GDP/cap until 2050. Forecasting GDP per capita is a crucial undertaking as it strongly correlates with welfare indicators like consumption, leisure, inequality, and mortality. These forecasts make the future more concrete and give us a better sense [...]
---
Outline:
(00:39) Results
(02:45) Discussion
(05:40) Values and Culture
(09:01) Growth could be much faster
(11:49) Implications for AI
(16:57) Will growth slow?
(19:56) Methods
(22:05) Persistence of growth
(23:26) Future Research
(29:05) Appendix: Further reading
(29:09) The World in 2050
(30:55) Economics
(30:59) GDP as a proxy for welfare
(31:03) AI
(36:32) Forecasting
(36:35) Fiction
(36:38) Appendix: Causal Model Between Growth, Liberal Democracy, Human Capital, Peace, and X-Risk
(36:59) Economic Growth causes…
(37:47) Democracy causes...
(40:02) Human capital causes…
(40:44) Peace and stability causes...
The original text contained 79 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---

First published:

May 6th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ubZjxQocGqeZJJXE9/gdp-per-capita-in-2050

---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I am dealing with repetitive strain injury and don’t foresee being able to really respond to any comments.
I’m a little hesitant to post this, but I thought I should be vulnerable. Honestly, I'm relieved that I finally get to share my voice. I know some people may want me to discuss this privately – but that might not be helpful to me, as I know some issues have been tried to be silenced by the very people who were meant to help. And to be honest, the fear of criticizing EA is something I have disliked about EA – I’ve been behind the scenes enough to know that despite being well-intentioned, criticizing EA (especially openly) can privately get you excluded from opportunities and circles, often even silently. This is an internal battle I’ve had with EA for a while (years). Still, I thought by sharing my experiences I [...]
---
Outline:
(00:55) Appreciation and disillusionment
(03:30) Specific challenges
(03:33) When it has been uncomfortable for diversity and inclusion
(04:33) When it primarily became about prestige or funding
(07:13) When professional social dynamics were unhealthy
(09:46) When empathy is deprioritized and logic/consequentialism/utilitarianism becomes toxic
(13:38) Parting ways
---

First published:

May 3rd, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3GjstAyhH9cDeNar4/my-lament-to-ea

---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a cross-post and you can see the original here, written in 2022. I am not the original author, but I thought it was good for more EAs to know about this.
I am posting anonymously for obvious reasons, but I am a longstanding EA who is concerned about Torres's effects on our community.
An incomplete summary
Introduction.
This post compiles evidence that Émile P. Torres, a philosophy student at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany, has a long pattern of concerning behavior, which includes gross distortion and falsification, persistent harassment, and the creation of fake identities.
Note: Since Torres has recently claimed that they have been the target of threats from anonymous accounts, I would like to state that I condemn any threatening behavior in the strongest terms possible, and that I have never contacted Torres or posted anything about Torres other than in this Substack [...]
---
Outline:
(00:25) An incomplete summary
(01:16) Stalking and harassment
(01:20) Peter Boghossian
(11:48) Helen Pluckrose
(19:02) Demonstrable falsehoods and gross distortions
(19:07) “Forcible” removal
(24:04) “Researcher at CSER”
(27:30) Giving What We Can
(31:20) Brief Digression on Effective Altruism
(33:53) More falsehoods and distortions
(33:57) Hilary Greaves
(38:25) Andreas Mogensen
(41:16) Nick Beckstead
(45:29) Tyler Cowen
(48:50) Olle Häggström
(56:44) Sockpuppetry
(57:01) “Alex Williams”
(01:03:57) Conclusion
---

First published:

May 1st, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yAHcPNZzx35i25xML/emile-p-torres-s-history-of-dishonesty-and-harassment

---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.