EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular‪)‬ EA Forum Team

Agreement
78 % of my donations so far have gone to the Long-Term Future Fund[1] (LTFF), which mainly supports AI safety interventions. However, I have become increasingly sceptical about the value of existential risk mitigation, and currently think the best interventions are in the area of animal welfare[2]. As a result, I realised it made sense for me to arrange a bet with someone very worried about AI in order to increase my donations to animal welfare interventions. Gregory Colbourn (Greg) was the 1st person I thought of. He said:
I think AGI [artificial general intelligence] is 0-5 years away and p(doom|AGI) is ~90%
I doubt doom in the sense of human extinction is anywhere as likely as suggested by the above. I guess the annual extinction risk over the next 10 years is 10^-7, so I proposed a bet to Greg similar to the end-of-the-world bet between [...]
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Outline:
(00:07) Agreement
(03:53) Impact
(05:18) Acknowledgements
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:

June 4th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GfGxaPBAMGcYjv8Xd/i-bet-greg-colbourn-10-keur-that-ai-will-not-kill-us-all-by

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Since 2017, EA Funds has been providing grants across four distinct cause areas. While there are payout reports available, there is a lack of reports detailing the outcomes of these grants, so I delved out of curiosity into the Grants Database to review some of the proposals that received funding and evaluate their outcomes.
Some of the findings were quite unexpected, particularly for the Long-Term Future Fund and the EA Infrastructure Fund.
The case involving a $100.000 grant for a video game
In July 2022, EA approved a $100,000 grant to Lone Pine Games, LLC, for developing and marketing a video game designed to explain the Stop Button Problem to the public and STEM professionals.

Outcomes from looking into Lone Pine Games, LLC:
After almost two years, there are no online mentions of such a game being developed by this company, except for the note on the [...] ---

First published:

June 3rd, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7Dp9phDw28h3dbAns/review-of-past-grants-the-usd100-000-grant-for-a-video-game

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR: I donated my kidney and you can too. If that's too scary, consider blood donation, the bone marrow registry, post-mortem organ donation, or other living donations (birth tissue, liver donation).
Kidney donation sucks. It's scary, painful, disruptive, scarring. My friends and family urged me not to; words were exchanged, tears were shed. My risk of preeclampsia tripled, that of end stage renal disease multiplied by five. I had to turn down two job offers while prepping for donation.
It is easy to read philosophical arguments in favor of donation, agree with them, and put the book back on the shelf. But it is different when your friend needs a kidney: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Eighteen months ago, at 28-years-old, my friend Alan started losing weight. He developed a distinctive butterfly-shaped rash and became too weak to eat. On February [...]
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First published:

May 30th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xiDKb3XvJxKiwNevJ/a-scar-worth-bearing-my-improbable-story-of-kidney-donation

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Executive Summary
Ansh, a 1-year-old Charity Entrepreneurship incubated charity, has been delivering an evidence-based, scientifically proven intervention called Kangaroo Care to low birth weight and premature babies in 2 government hospitals in India since January 2024. Ansh estimates that their programs are saving, on average, 4 lives a month per facility and a total of 98 lives per year. The cost of one life saved is approximately $2077 (current costs, not a potential estimate). Ansh is now replicating the programs in two additional hospitals, doubling their impact before the end of this year.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), neonatal conditions[1] are among the top 3 causes of death worldwide[2]. This makes neonatal mortality one of the largest-scale causes of suffering and death today. In 2022, 2.3 million babies died in the first 28 days of life (i.e. the newborn/neonatal period) (World Health Organisation, 2024). Let's compare [...]
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Outline:
(00:06) Executive Summary
(02:33) I. The Problem and Solution
(04:29) II. Introducing Ansh
(08:36) III. Our Impact To Date
(09:02) Baseline Neonatal Mortality
(10:49) Lives Saved
(12:56) Cost-Effectiveness
(15:36) IV. Our Plans For The Future
(16:04) (1) KC Improvements
(18:48) (2) Scale Up
(20:34) V. Acknowledgments and Partnerships
The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:

May 29th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hTEaKau8D4Ah3NPcu/introducing-ansh-a-charity-entrepreneurship-incubated

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Epistemic Status: somewhat confident: I may have made coding mistakes. R code is here if you feel like checking.
Introduction: 
In their 2022 article, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Kahneman looked to reconcile the results from two of their papers. Kahneman (2010) had reported that above a certain income level ($75,000 USD), extra income had no association with increases in individual happiness. Killingsworth (2021) suggested that it did.
Kahneman and Killingsworth (henceforth KK) claimed they had resolved this conflict by (correctly) hypothesizing that:
1) There is an unhappy minority, whose unhappiness diminishes with rising income up to a threshold, then shows no further progress (i.e., Kahnemann's leveling off);
2) In the happier majority, happiness continues to rise with income even in the high range of incomes (i.e., Kllingsworth continued log-linear finding)
(More info on this discussion can be found in Spencer Greenberg's thoroughly enjoyable blog post. Spencer [...]
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Outline:
(00:18) Introduction:
(03:04) Summary of Findings
(04:07) Results
(05:07) Median Regressions
(05:21) Figure 1
(06:16) Regressions at Various Percentiles
(06:55) Figure 2
(08:38) Implications
(10:50) Table 1: Happiness at Different Percentiles (above, KK; below, me)
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:

May 28th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A5voYMFhPkWTrGkuJ/against-a-happiness-ceiling-replicating-killingsworth-and

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

From my new blog: AI Lab Watch. All posts will be crossposted to LessWrong. Subscribe on Substack.
Many AI safety folks think that METR is close to the labs, with ongoing relationships that grant it access to models before they are deployed. This is incorrect. METR (then called ARC Evals) did pre-deployment evaluation for GPT-4 and Claude 2 in the first half of 2023, but it seems to have had no special access since then.[1] Other model evaluators also seem to have little access before deployment.
Clarification: there are many kinds of audits. This post is about model evals for dangerous capabilities. But I'm not aware of the labs using other kinds of audits to prevent extreme risks, excluding normal security/compliance audits.
Frontier AI labs' pre-deployment risk assessment should involve external model evals for dangerous capabilities.[2] External evals can improve a lab's risk assessment and—if the evaluator can publish [...]
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:

May 26th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZPyhxiBqupZXLxLNd/ai-companies-aren-t-really-using-external-evaluators-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.