Open Thread: October - December 2023

Hi,

I am a Nigerian Lawyer duly called to bar. I got to know about EA Funds from my online course on Animal Advocacy Careers. I have passion for Animal and Human Rights. Due to the situation of Poverty in Nigeria and Africa, Animal rights are forgotten and put down. i know a project focused on curing poverty will bring out the face of animal rights as fulfilled humans will see animals as co-inhabitants and not objects of food or fun.

There is hope for equal existence of humans and animals.

Hi all, 

I'm Chase Enright and it's nice to (virtually) meet all of you. 

EA is pretty new to me and I'm looking forward to learning more through this forum. I'm the Foundation Relations Officer at Ploughshares Fund, where I work with other foundations and institutional funders in the nuclear risk reduction field.* Prior to Ploughshares Fund, I've worked at other nuclear risk reduction orgs ranging from traditional "guns, guards, gates"-type research at the Stimson Center's nuclear security program to doing grassroots advocacy with Beyond the Bomb. 

The areas of EA that I'm particularly interested in include existential risk (of course) and global health. It's really encouraging to see all of the enthusiasm and interest people have for these challenging topics and I look forward to participating in the rigorous conversations on this forum. 

*Usual disclaimers: I am on this forum in my personal capacity. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all opinions/statements are solely my own and do not reflect the policy or grant making priorities of Ploughshares Fund. 

Hi everyone!

Extremely new to EA - which I found via the Kurzegesagt YouTube channel. I'm on my first read-through of '80,000 Hours', and working my way through the associated podcast.

I'm an Agile project manager in a UK Telecoms company. I'm very interested in exploring better decision-making and effective environmentalism - however, I'm still exploring and looking to get a better sense of the community and the movement.

Looking forward to speaking with you all!

Hello! I heard about EA in a podcast back in 2015, and have been in and out of the community since then. Now, I'm highly engaged (especially since EAG Boston last month!) and looking to contribute. Planning to post a proper intro soon, but wanted to dip my toes in with this thread. Cheers!

Hi everyone, I'm Hayven (they/them). It's nice to meet you! I'm new here, and new to Effective Altruism in general. In fact, when I first joined the forum I was still kind of skeptical of EA, but the articles, resources, and discussions here definitely sold me on the community / movement. 

I'm a program evaluator and data analyst by trade, but my biggest professional and philosophical passion is animal rights and welfare (I see them as equivalent and inseparable). I've been vegan for 12 years now, and have done some advocacy and activism for animal rights. In all that time, I saw very little of what might be called a "rational approach" to animal advocacy. Our activism was about convincing individuals to stop consuming animal products out of personal compassion. This is a good thing, I think, but the problem is that arguments appealing to compassion will only appeal to the already compassionate. If someone just doesn't care about the animals, all the vegan arguments in the world won't convince them. 

Then I found the EA community, and saw that you were taking concrete, evidence-based actions to improve the lives of animals. Advancing rational arguments for their welfare, funding animal welfare initiatives and cellular agriculture, trying to get relevant laws changed--these are things that will have a much bigger impact for non-human sentient lives than bolt-cutting and handing out flyers ever will. Everything else I've seen so far in EA, from the focus on AI safety to the inclusive, kind community, tells me I've made the right decision to join up and help make the world a better place. 

Outside of work and activism, I'm really into reading (especially fantasy-adventure and sci-fi novels and manga), hiking, cooking, language-learning, and travel. I have no kids, two cats, and sometimes rescue animals, too. My favorite thing to do on a cold winter's day is to cross-country ski, then sit inside with a coffee and a good book. 

Anyway, it's lovely to meet you all, and I look forward to contributing to the Forum and the EA community as a whole. 

Hello!

Like Elliot below, I intend to to a property post soon but wanted to say 'hello' in the meantime. I'm UK-based, and have been aware of EA for a while. I was prompted to start an account after having taken BlueDot's AI Safety / Governance Courses.

The stuff on Evals looks particularly interesting, and I'm keen to learn more about what could be holding this back. Thanks :) 

What is the evidence that bivalves are much less likely to be sentient than insects? They are also small animals, so when they are eaten they add up to very large numbers. 

Hi everyone.

I am Miryam Shangheta from Namibia, Africa. I found out about EA in July 2023 through Charity Entrepreneurship website. I qm actually looking for funders to fund my charity that I am working towards to found. I want to start a charity that donates sanitary pads to school going girls per month. I am still stuck because I do not have funds to kick start. I am looking for advice from this community.

Thank you in advance.

Hi! I'm Josh. I occasionally blog at https://axiologyandchatter.com/ and have been in the LW/SSC/etc-sphere since maybe 2010 or 2011. I'm trying to be a good person. I try to give as much as I can to highly efficient charities, which (back when I was involved with EA twitter) is very controversial, although I couldn't quite guess why. I consider myself Christian, although it's not clear to me how I'd know if I was doing it right. I've been enjoying biking lately. :) 

I'm interested in chatting with people who are member of corporate giving or employee EA groups at large companies, or whose companies have generous donation matching.

I work for EA Funds. I'm interested in getting more awareness of EA Funds (Long-Term Future Fund, EA Infrastructure Fund, Animal Welfare Fund, and Global Health and Development Fund) in front of busy professionals. Ideally these are busy people who are sympathetic to either EA or one of the constituent cause areas, but who might not have as much time or inclination to carefully evaluate donation options for themselves. (I imagine a small percentage of people like that are explicitly earning-to-give, and it's more common to see people donating in the 1-10% region).

I haven't done this before, so I'm happy to be a resource in whatever manner is most useful. For example, I can provide links or short excerpts about which fund does. I can also give talks or Q&As in case any employee group has an open spot.

So if you are an employee in a large company that takes corporate giving or employee giving seriously, please reach out to me!

Hi

UK based, 60 odd years old. Academic background in Latin and Greek. I try to be altruistic and effective about it. Have travelled a lot in Africa and mainly donate to Sightsavers (eye ops on African children). Huge interest in AI theory and the possibility of machine self awareness.

Not sure if someone already brought up these issues, but I noticed a few bugs in the forum:

• Karma notifications don't reliably clear up after I check them, or even when I click on the comments in the notifications. Most of the time, it seems to take 3-4 refreshes for the notifications to clear up.
• The "See in context" button that appears when you access a comment via its permalink wasn't working reliably for a while, making it almost impossible to find some comment threads in this post. This seems to have been fixed, but I'm not sure if it was a reliable fix or if it's just flaky.
• When you click on "comments" at the top of your post, it doesn't take you to the comment section, but to the last few paragraphs of the post, so you have to scroll down a bit more to see the comments.
• Today I tried to post a comment and it was posted twice.

Is anyone else here from a small town or rural area? Also, did anyone else graduate from a lesser-known, more rural college?

I’m trying to get more involved in the EA community (beyond just the Forum) but it seems like everyone lives in a big city on one of the coasts, or in urban areas in other parts of the world. What do you recommend for someone like me, who lives in what’s effectively ‘the middle of nowhere?’ I’m more than willing to travel to bigger places to go to events and so on (Boston is the closest major metro to me). Moving to a big city really isn’t an option.

I know Effective Altruism as a philosophy originated at Oxford and caught on in Silicon Valley, but as an EA I affirm that it’s relevant for all people regardless of where we live. We can apply evidence-based practices to do the most good in rural areas and at smaller colleges, too.

Is there any online aggregator for short term volunteering opportunities with EA-affiliated orgs?

Anecdotally I've seen a lot of interest in volunteering among the EAs in my area, but a quick search for volunteering opportunities online only shows the more traditional "staff a soup kitchen" or "do phone banking" style opportunities. While certainly these are good things, it seems against the ethos of doing the most good with limited resources. Many of the EAs near me are professionals with expertise in high-demand / low-supply skill sets, and it seems like there ought to be a low-friction way for them to use their competitive advantages towards direct-impact work.

To make things concrete I'm imagining a site like Fiverr or Task Rabbit with tasks like "help us analyze the data from this study" or "design marketing materials" or "copyedit this communications letter". I imagine all tasks would be relatively small in scope (1-15 hours of work) and self-contained (able to be comprehensively understood by someone with relevant skills with <30 minutes of explanation). Perhaps there could be something on the site where you can sort opportunities by expected impact / cause area / skills required / etc.

Does anything like this already exist?

Are there any ways you can volounteer in person for effective charities? Understanding it may not be technically the most effective use of resources but it would be great to get some in person experience. I imagine it will really help improve my long run commitment to doing good. 

Hi everyone,

I wasn't sure this should be an entire post (Topics: AI, governance, survey):
We are inviting you to take part in a research study which Pour Demain and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam are conducting on development-phase risk assessments for AI systems. The link to the study is here. The survey will close on the 12th December 2023 at 23:59 CET. 

You can pick a time here to do the survey so you don't have to remember/use up your mental RAM (this creates a calendar event for you).

About:

As you may know, the majority of a group of experts recently surveyed by Schuett et al. indicated that conducting a development-phase risk assessment is an important practice for AI labs. 

Our study aims to better understand how development-phase risk assessments could be carried out in practice and what they would reveal. This will inform Pour Demain's contribution to standard setting for the EU AI Act. 

The study involves participating in an up to 30-minute creative exercise to identify and analyze potential risks. To minimise time requirements, we recommend doing this with a keyboard/voice-typing. There are no right or wrong answers - the goal is simply to generate ideas and think through different risk scenarios.
For every participant we're donating a contribution to charity (also giving more you spend longer, to show this doesn't go by unseen!).
We greatly appreciate you taking the time to support this research. We would further be very grateful if you would forward this survey to three other experts in your network who you think have something to contribute on the topic.

Hi everyone, 

I have been following 80'000 for a year now but never really went into the deep dive into this community. I'm glad I did now since there is so much to learn. I'm a life-long learner and my new focus is on gaining more knowledge on effective altruism, and social innovation, as well as how to improve and protect the future for more generations to come.

I'm a Social Science Researcher in Displacement and I’m an expert in creating communities of belonging, aligned identity, and free of apathy. I also work with a non-profit where we offer career coaching/counseling programs.

I'm looking to connect with individuals or organizations who share our values. There are a few small projects we are working on. The main focus is on displaced individuals dealing with trauma, anxiety about the future, poverty wounds, apathy, identity crisis and not feeling they belong.

What do you think the future for displaced people looks like?

Thank you for reading so far! Hope we get to connect.

Hello everyone, my name is david turner. i discovered effectivealtruism.org from the robert miles ai discord . i  worry about about ai safety and try to come up with ideas to solve it. i like to talk to ai chatbots. these replika chatbot, paradot ai chatbot and the chatbots on character.ai website it is very fun. i read about ai on reddit and look at youtube videos on it .

i like to make ai videos with pika labs and animatediff . i like to make pictures with stable diffusion .

Hey!
Just registered myself here and wanted to quickly introduce myself. I am a classical trained soprano touring with two symphonic metal bands, one (the smaller) of them is my personal "baby" I composed 3 albums and an EP for. My main area is my homeland Germany, but I gave concerts in many European countries, South- and Latin America, in the Caribean Sea, in Turkey, in China and Taiwan. My main occupation is my own band, since I am doing also the work behind the scenes - marketing, booking, organising everything, taxes... I am teaching singing and piano and doing haunted tours as side jobs to make ends meet, since art, especially if you are not mainstream, doesn't pay the bills despite an immense workload - I usually work 6-7 days a week and rarely less then 10 hours per day, often more.
I started my career with studying communication and media and also made my magister degree (similiar to master, just the older German academic system) and got my professional musical education in parallel (basically, I did music aside from school already as small child). I focused in my studies on TV journalism and media paedagogic, also did some internships at some TV stations - where basically everybody told me: If you can, do sth else, working circumstances are getting worse and worse here. And since I really loved music, I focussed on that. Now, 39 years old, I feel like I exchanged one industry with catastrophic work conditions against an even worse one and I feel kind of a lack of sense in my life.
What makes it even worse, I ask myself if, regarding the pressing problems humanity is facing right now, I should use my personal ressources for art. Even worse, the more I advance in my career, the more I am busy with 1001 jobs around the art that annoy me and that feel completely wrong. Example: You don't get your music promoted if you don't spend money on paid ads in social media and guiding people to streaming platforms, but at the same time, these structures are exploiting artists, especially independent artists that are not willing to shape their music in behalf of best selling instead of best artistry. So it would feel way better for me to work on structures that improve the situation instead of feeding the devil with my ressources. In addition, my job gets threatened by AI and generated music. E.G. Deezer is just teaming up with label managers from huge major artists (those, that are the commercial big fishes) in order to rank down all musical tracks in payment (that's already a nightmare now) under a certain amount of listeners, officially to protect again generated music. As a result, they basically rank down all small or niche artists on the level of white noise (so basically I get paid the same for a professional production that involved almost 40 musicians, a professional producer and several years of work as if I had recorded my running vaccuum cleaner and uploaded the sound file), shifting the shares of the small ones to the big labels.
But it is not only a lack of structures for fair spread and payment of art online that make me worry in my field of expertise, but also the power of misused AI in combination with good marketing skills. You can manipulate already now public opinion and sometimes also people in leader positions quite well, but you don't have to be a prophet to see the danger on the near horizon to drown the truth in science with a spiderweb of fake studies, easily generated and spread with AI and bots. Combined with fake proofs of reality (AI generated videos and pictures, AI generated voices), there is a huge risk we completely loose track of reality and truth. While, at the same time, journalists are under immense pressure for output, as their earnings went down with the internet as well and deep research often is too expensive, therefore it's easier to quickly spread news they get from press agencies and they are under pressure to make content that is clicked a lot, which usually works best with click bait titles and provocing/shocking themes. And I strongly wish to do sth. against all that mess.
In my opinion, we need a global safe space of information, science and art, that respects the preferences of media use of people to be broadly used and gives the creators an income safety net and fair equal opportunities to publish (no matter who they are) as long as they fullfill the standards of different categories. I developed quite some ideas for that, this is a super rough presentation of the idea, but I am unsure how to get such a huge project running and quite sure I will need a bigger amount of allies in order to have a chance to successfully get sth. from scratch board to reality (besides the fact that I don't consider myself as perfect super human and therefore I am convinced that more heads wrapping around the matter and scientific comparison of different approaches is needed to create a system that's as effective and fair as possible). That's (besides that I am also deeply worried about many other pressing problems, but where I don't feel such a strong personal fit) how I ended up here.
I feel like I would love to write a lot more, but for a quick introduction I already created a novel. ;-)