EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular‪)‬ EA Forum Team

Summary
Rebecca Kagan believes “EA needs an investigation, done externally and shared publicly, on mistakes made in the EA community's relationship with FTX.” She is far from the only person who has called for an independent investigation, but Kagan's experience and knowledge as a former board member of Effective Ventures makes her perspective particularly relevant.
Explaining her decision to resign from EV's board, Kagan wrote:
“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… I believe there were extensive and significant mistakes made which have not been addressed. (In particular, some EA leaders had warning signs about SBF that they ignored, and instead promoted him as a good person, tied the EA community to FTX, and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations [...]
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Outline:
(00:08) Summary
(06:11) Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters.
(06:45) Circa ~2017, SBF was one of 80k and CEA's largest donors.
(08:30) SBF served on CEA's board.
(09:00) SBF worked for CEA.
(09:20) Multiple EA leaders and organizations were aware about allegations stemming from the Alameda dispute.
(10:24) Open questions:
(11:37) There are worrisome discrepancies between comments from EA leaders and credible media reports.
(12:01) Will's professed ignorance about inappropriate romantic relationships SBF had while at Alameda directly conflicts with Time's reporting on the subject.
(12:57) Will's characterization of what complaints he heard about SBF related to the Alameda dispute, and when he heard them, conflicts with Time's reporting
(14:52) Nobody in EA leadership has publicly acknowledged the New Yorker's report that many leaders received warnings that SBF was being investigated for criminal behavior four months before FTX's collapse (other than to deny personally having seen said warnings)
(16:27) EA leadership has not acknowledged an internal CEA investigation and/or board assessment conducted relating to Alameda, which both Time and Semafor have reported
(18:00) Open questions:
(20:49) EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading
(22:49) Open questions
The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:

July 24th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P9phn7uhjiCvaCPDZ/we-need-an-independent-investigation-into-how-ea-leadership

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. Folks in philanthropy and development definitely know that the Gates Foundation is the largest private player in that realm by far. Until recently it was likely to get even larger, as Warren Buffet had stated that the Foundation would receive the bulk of his assets when he died. A few weeks ago, Buffet announced that he had changed his mind, and was instead going to create a new trust for his assets, to be jointly managed by his children. It's a huge change, but I don't think very many people took note of what it means ("A billionaire is going to create his own foundation rather than giving to an existing one; seems unsurprising."). So I created this chart:
The new Buffet-funded trust is going to be nearly twice as large as the Gates Foundation, and nearly 150% larger than most of the other brand [...]
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First published:

July 15th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bqi2M8oayRDvuGQg9/warren-buffett-changes-giving-plans-for-the-worse

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Link to tool: https://parliament.rethinkpriorities.org
(1 min) Introductory Video
(6 min) Basic Features Video
Executive Summary
This post introduces Rethink Priorities’ Moral Parliament Tool, which models ways an agent can make decisions about how to allocate goods in light of normative uncertainty. We treat normative uncertainty as uncertainty over worldviews. A worldview encompasses a set of normative commitments, including first-order moral theories, values, and attitudes toward risk. We represent worldviews as delegates in a moral parliament who decide on an allocation of funds to a diverse array of charitable projects. Users can configure the parliament to represent their own credences in different worldviews and choose among several procedures for finding their best all-things-considered philanthropic allocation. The relevant procedures are metanormative methods. These methods take worldviews and our credences in them as inputs and produce some action guidance as an output. Some proposed methods have taken inspiration from political or market processes involving agents [...] ---
Outline:
(00:24) Executive Summary
(02:18) Introduction
(03:47) How does it work?
(04:21) Worldviews
(08:07) Projects
(10:45) Metanormative parliament
(12:11) The Moral Parliament Tool at work
(12:16) (How) do empirical assumptions matter?
(12:20) Uncertainties about scale
(14:13) How much does scale matter?
(16:10) An example project: The Cassandra Fund
(19:15) What would an EA parliament do?
(19:21) Normative uncertainty among EAs
(21:17) Results
(24:12) Takeaways
(26:40) Getting Started
(27:04) Acknowledgments
The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
The original text contained 17 images which were described by AI.
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First published:

July 17th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HxphJhSiXBQ74uxJX/rethink-priorities-moral-parliament-tool

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Highlights
Destabilization could be the biggest setback for great power conflict, AI, bio-risk, and climate disruption. Polarization plays a role in nearly every causal pathway leading to destabilization of the United States, and there is no indication polarization will decrease. The United States fits the pattern of past democracies that have descended into authoritarian regimes in many key aspects. The most recent empirical research on civil conflicts suggests the United States is in a category that has a 4% annual risk of falling into a civil conflict. In 2022 (when this was originally written), Mike Berkowitz, ED of Democracy Funders Network and 80,000 Hours guest, believes there is 50% chance American democracy fails in the next 6 years. For every dollar spent on depolarization efforts, there are probably at least a hundred dollars spent aggravating the culture war. Destabilization of the United States could wipe out billions of dollars of pledged EA funds.
Note following the [...]
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Outline:
(00:07) Highlights
(01:16) Note following the assassination attempt of former President Trump
(02:45) Preface
(06:10) Acknowledgements
(06:24) Summary
(09:08) Possibility
(10:02) Big picture
(10:06) Authoritarianism
(12:57) Civil conflict
(16:50) Polarization
(20:40) How close we already came (January 6th)
(26:42) A note on the military counter argument
(28:18) Top reasons why the United States wouldn’t destabilize
(29:14) What I would have included in a longer version
(29:51) Conclusion
(31:36) Importance
(31:59) Global ramifications and great power conflict
(33:17) Artificial Intelligence and bio-risk
(33:22) Applicable to both
(34:27) Artificial Intelligence
(34:48) Accelerating climate disruption
(34:52) Authoritarianism
(35:25) Civil conflict
(36:08) Significance
(37:02) Effects on the Effective Altruism movement
(37:06) Talent
(37:29) Funds
(38:15) Plausible scenario
(39:01) Neglectedness
(40:36) Through the lens of polarization
(42:03) Tractability
(44:15) What is needed
(44:18) The broad needs
(44:46) Structural-reform needs\[80\]
(46:03) Needs for stopping polarizing forces
(46:38) Needs for Depolarizing the population
(46:58) Why it's difficult
(47:02) Structural reform
(47:36) Stopping polarizing forces
(49:01) Depolarize the population
(50:36) Where there is traction
(50:40) Ballot initiatives
(51:29) Robust federalism
(51:48) Prescription (what OP/EA could do)
(53:04) Funding and scaling existing efforts
(53:09) Create an operation focused on recruiting more funders and key non-funder partners to this effort
(54:00) Fund ballot initiative efforts and organizations
(56:15) Fund existing depolarization efforts and organizations
(56:51) Fund new organizations to fill gaps through an approach similar to the arrangement between CE and FTX for biosecurity
(57:54) Fund experiments/projects that will give us actionable information
(58:30) Miscellaneous interventions
(58:34) Preempting accelerationist events
(01:00:19) Invest in local journalism
(01:00:51) Promote sincere populist leadership in the Republican apparatus to replace culture warriors
(01:03:49) Invest in mutual aid networks
(01:04:17) Strengthening unions and preparing for a general strike
(01:05:32) My personal favorite
(01:05:36) Left-Right coalitions to run a slate of ballot-initiatives for structural reform
(01:06:49) Uncertainties (why OP/EA should do a medium-level investigation)
(01:08:21) Conclusion/call to action
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First published:

July 15th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kmx3rKh2K4ANwMqpW/destabilization-of-the-united-states-the-top-x-factor-ea

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Summary/Introduction
Aschenbrenner's ‘Situational Awareness’ (Aschenbrenner, 2024) promotes a dangerous narrative of national securitisation. This narrative is not, despite what Aschenbrenner suggests, descriptive, but rather, it is performative, constructing a particular notion of security that makes the dangerous world Aschenbrenner describes more likely to happen.
This piece draws on the work of Nathan A. Sears (2023), who argues that the failure to sufficiently eliminate plausible existential threats throughout the 20th century emerges from a ‘national securitisation’ narrative winning out over a ‘humanity macrosecuritization narrative’. National securitisation privileges extraordinary measures to defend the nation, often centred around military force and logics of deterrence/balance of power and defence. Humanity macrosecuritization suggests the object of security is to defend all of humanity, not just the nation, and often invokes logics of collaboration, mutual restraint and constraints on sovereignty. Sears uses a number of examples to show that when issues are constructed as issues [...]
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Outline:
(00:08) Summary/Introduction
(03:03) Section 1- What is securitisation
(07:39) Section 2: Sears 2023 - The macrosecuritization of Existential Threats to humanity
(16:25) Section 3 - How does this relate to Aschenbrenner's ‘Situational Awareness’?
(19:49) Section 4 - Why Aschenbrenners narrative is dangerous and the role of expert communities
(29:35) Section 5- The possibility of a moratorium, military conflict and collaboration
(36:51) Conclusion
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First published:

July 15th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H6xEhur9Lbbv9dhBC/against-aschenbrenner-how-situational-awareness-constructs-a

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I'm often asked about how the existential risk landscape has changed in the years since I wrote The Precipice. Earlier this year, I gave a talk on exactly that, and I want to share it here.
Here's a video of the talk and a full transcript.

In the years since I wrote The Precipice, the question I’m asked most is how the risks have changed. It's now almost four years since the book came out, but the text has to be locked down a long time earlier, so we are really coming up on about five years of changes to the risk landscape.
I’m going to dive into four of the biggest risks — climate change, nuclear, pandemics, and AI — to show how they’ve changed. Now a lot has happened over those years, and I don’t want this to just be recapping the news in fast-forward. But [...]
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Outline:
(01:30) Climate Change
(01:58) Carbon Emissions
(03:18) Climate Sensitivity
(06:43) Nuclear
(06:46) Heightened Chance of Onset
(08:16) Likely New Arms Race
(09:54) Funding Collapse
(10:53) Pandemics
(10:56) Covid
(16:03) Protective technologies
(18:59) AI in Biotech
(20:32) AI
(20:50) RL agents ⇒ language models
(24:59) Racing
(27:05) Governance
(30:14) Conclusions
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First published:

July 12th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iKLLSYHvnhgcpoBxH/the-precipice-revisited

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