“Do AI safety talent programmes work? Nobody has run the study that would tell us.” by Laura Thomas-Walters
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme tha...
14 Sep 12min
“Beware Silver Bullets: Are we making “welfare tech” into the next animal advocacy bubble?” by Rockwell, Tom Billington
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata. Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably wr...
14 Sep 15min
“Alone again: facing the possibility of AI takeover as the world sleepwalks on” by George Rosenfeld
I’ve been feeling pretty shaken since the METR report about the Hugging Face incident came out last week. Over the weekend, I wrote up some thoughts on how lonely the AI situation sometimes feels to m...
9 Sep 8min
“Moral Imagination & Effective Altruism” by Toby_Ord
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'. As examples, he gives: Ha...
28 Aug 11min
“What if the third wave is a puddle?” by Morgan Fairless
The world of private philanthropy may be in for a period of large growth. News of Coefficient Giving increasing their funding for GiveWell to one billion in the near-term, and the general growth of th...
18 Aug 9min
“What would make us scale or stop? NOVAH’s pre-commitment before seeing the RCT results” by I.J.J., AlexisAt
TL;DR NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our ca...
17 Aug 15min
“General capability - and capabilities generally - have no good y-axis” by Gregory Lewis🔸
BLUF: To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a...
8 Aug 1h 7min
“Never born, then maybe died twice” by NickLaing
“Your balls are baked aren’t they, mate”. He would not have been bornThanks Lyndon, that describes the situation. Like almost 1 in 10 modern men, my sperm weren’t up to the task - at least not the old...
1 Aug 10min
