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Inside Wytham Abbey, the £15 Million Castle Effective Altruism Must Sell [Bloomberg] From the article: > Effective Ventures has since come to a settlement with the FTX estate and paid back the $26.8 million given to it by FTX Foundation. [...] It’s amid such turmoil that Wytham Abbey is being listed on the open market for £15 million [...] > > Adjusted for inflation, the purchase price of the house two years ago now equals £16.2 million. [...] The listing comes as homes on the UK’s once-hot country market are taking longer to sell, forcing some owners to offer discounts. I still think the intangible reputational damage is worse, but a loss of a million pounds (that could've been spent on malaria bed nets) would be nothing to sneeze at either. (archive link)
FAQ: “Ways the world is getting better” banner The banner will only be visible on desktop. If you can't see it, try expanding your window. It'll be up for a week.  How do I use the banner? 1. Click on an empty space to add an emoji,  2. Choose your emoji,  3. Write a one-sentence description of the good news you want to share,  4. Link an article or forum post that gives more information.  If you’d like to delete your entry, click the cross that appears when you hover over it. It will be deleted for everyone. What kind of stuff should I write? Anything that qualifies as good news relevant to the world's most important problems.  For example, Ben West’s recent quick takes (1, 2, 3). Avoid posting partisan political news, but the passage of relevant bills and policies is on topic.  Will my entry be anonymous? All submissions are displayed without your Forum name, so they are ~anonymous to users, however, usual moderation norms still apply (additionally, we may remove duplicates or borderline trollish submissions. This is an experiment, so we reserve the right to moderate heavily if necessary). Ask any other questions you have in the comments below. Feel free to dm me with feedback or comments.  
Common prevalence estimates are often wrong. Example: snakebites and my experience reading Long Covid literature. Both institutions like the WHO and academic literature appear to be incentivized to exaggerate. I think the Global Burden of Disease might be a more reliable source, but have not looked into it. I advise everyone using prevalence estimates to treat them with some skepticism and look up the source.
EAGxUtrecht (July 5-7) is now inviting applicants from the UK (alongside other Western European regions that don't currently have an upcoming EAGx).[1] Apply here! Ticket discounts are available and we have limited travel support. Utrecht is very easy to get to. You can fly/Eurostar to Amsterdam and then every 15 mins there's a direct train to Utrecht, which only takes 35 mins (and costs €10.20). 1. ^ Applicants from elsewhere are encouraged to apply but the bar for getting in is much higher.
I've recently made an update to our Announcement on the future of Wytham Abbey, saying that since this announcement, we have decided that we will use some of the proceeds on Effective Venture's general costs.

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Bob Jacobs posted a Quick Take

Inside Wytham Abbey, the £15 Million Castle Effective Altruism Must Sell [Bloomberg]

From the article:

Effective Ventures has since come to a settlement with the FTX estate and paid back the $26.8 million given to it by FTX Foundation. [...] It’s amid such turmoil that Wytham Abbey is being listed on the open market for £15 million [...]

Adjusted for inflation, the purchase price of the house two years ago now equals £16.2 million. [...] The listing comes as homes on the UK’s once-hot country market are taking longer to sell, forcing some owners to offer discounts.

I still think the intangible reputational damage is worse, but a loss of a million pounds (that could've been spent on malaria bed nets) would be nothing to sneeze at either.

(archive link)

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Just as the 2022 crypto crash had many downstream effects for effective altruism, so could a future crash in AI stocks have several negative (though hopefully less severe) effects on AI safety.

Why might AI stocks crash?

The most obvious reason AI stocks might crash is that...

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Thanks for the post, Ben!

First, the wealth of many donors to AI safety is pretty correlated with AI stocks.

I like that Founders Pledge's Patient Philanthropy Fund (PPF) invests in "a low-fee Global Stock Index Fund".

10
Benjamin_Todd
You could look for investments that do neutral-to-well in a TAI world, but have low-to-negative correlation to AI stocks in the short term. That could reduce overall portfolio risk but without worsening returns if AI does well. This seems quite hard, but the best ideas I've seen so far are: 1. The cluster of resources companies, electricity producers, commodities, land. There's reason to think these could do quite well during a TAI transition, but in the short term they do well when inflation rises, which tends to be bad for AI stocks. (And they were effective hedges in the most recent draw down and in 2022.) Some of them also look quite cheap at the moment. However, in a recession, they will fall at the same time as AI stocks. 2. Short long-dated government bonds or AI company credit. In the short term helps to hedge out the interest rate and inflation exposure in AI companies, and should also do well in the long term if an AI boom increases interest rates. Credit spreads are narrow so you're not paying much for the hedge. However, if there's a recession, these will also do badly. 3. Index shorts (especially focused on old economy stocks). This could reduce overall market risk, and AI stocks will most likely fall at the same time as other stocks. If you buy long dated put options there's some reason to think AI will increase volatility, so you might also benefit a little there. However, on net it might be desirable to have high market exposure / this trade most likely loses money. 4. Long-short multi-asset trend-following. This is an active strategy (so you might be skeptical that it works) but tends to do well during macro regime changes / big market crashes / high volatility, which will likely be times when AI stocks are doing badly. But for the same reasons it could also do well during an AI boom. However, all of these have important downsides and someone would need to put billions of dollars behind them to have much impact on the overall portfolio. 
6
MichaelStJules
How much impact do you expect such a COI to have compared to the extra potential donations? For reference: 1. You could have more than doubled your investments over the past 1 year period by investing in the right AI companies, e.g. Nvidia, which seemed like a predictably good investment based on market share and % exposure to AI and is up +200% (3x). SMH is up +77%. 2. Even the S&P500 is around 30% Microsoft, Apple (maybe not much of an AI play now), Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, Google/Alphabet and Broadcom, and these big tech companies have driven most of its gains recently (e.g. this and this). And how far do you go in recommending divestment from AI to avoid COIs? 1. Do you think people should avoid the S&P500, because its exposure to AI companies is so high? (Maybe equal-weight ETFs, or specific ETFs missing these companies, or other asset classes.) 2. Do you think people should short or buy put options on AI companies? This way they're even more incentivized to see them do badly.

This article is last in a series of 10 posts comprising a 2024 State of the AI Regulatory Landscape Review, conducted by the Governance Recommendations Research Program at Convergence Analysis. Each post will cover a specific domain of AI governance, such as incident reportingsafety evals, model registries, and more. We’ll provide an overview of existing regulations, focusing on the US, EU, and China as the leading governmental bodies currently developing AI legislation. Additionally, we’ll discuss the relevant context behind each domain and conduct a short analysis.

This series is intended to be a primer for policymakers, researchers, and individuals seeking to develop a high-level overview of the current AI governance space. We’ll publish individual posts on our website and release a comprehensive report at the end of this series.

What are CBRN hazards? How could

...
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High Impact Professionals is excited to announce that applications are now open for the Summer 2024 round of our Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). The IAP is a 6-week program designed to equip experienced EA-aligned professionals (not currently working at an EA organization...

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Is there any chance that you could make the content publicly available?

yanni kyriacos posted a Quick Take

Is there a Slack group or something similar for Founders of early-stage (EA) startups? 

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huw commented on SiebeRozendal's quick take

Common prevalence estimates are often wrong. Example: snakebites and my experience reading Long Covid literature.

Both institutions like the WHO and academic literature appear to be incentivized to exaggerate. I think the Global Burden of Disease might be a more reliable source, but have not looked into it.

I advise everyone using prevalence estimates to treat them with some skepticism and look up the source.

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Global Burden of Disease (GBD) is okay, it depends a lot on what disease & metric you're looking at, and how aware you are of the caveats around it. Some of these:

  • A lot of the data is estimated, rather than real measurements of prevalence
    • I think most people understand this, but it's always worth a reminder
    • The GBD provides credible intervals for all major statistics and these should definitely be used!
    • This paper on the Major Depressive Disorder estimates is a good overview for a specific disease
  • The moral weights for estimating the years lived with disability for a given disease are compiled from a wide survey of the general public
    • This means they're based on people's general belief of what it would be like to have that condition, even if they haven't experienced it or know anyone who has
    • Older GBDs included expert opinion in their moral weights, but to remove biases they don't do this anymore (IMHO I think this is the right call)
  • The estimates for prevalence are compiled differently per condition by experts in that condition
    • There is some overall standardisation, but equally, there's some wiggle room for a motivated researcher to inflate their prevalence estimates. I assume the thinking is that these biases cancel out in some overall sense.

Overall, I think the GBD is very robust and an extremely useful tool, especially for (a) making direct comparisons between countries or diseases and (b) where no direct, trustworthy, country-specific data is available. But you should be able to improve on its accuracy if you have an inside view on a particular situation. I don't think it's subject to the incentives you mention above in quite the same way.

I think it would be worth the while of the Center of Effective Altruism and forum administrators to build a section, accessible through the sidebar or potentially somewhere even more attention-grabbing, wherein forum users can upload a career profile, including a section for current aspirations, a reflection on one's current job/etc, and of course a link to or embedded resume.

Other users could browse profiles, responding to questions posed on the profile or making recommendations based on the individual's goals and experience.

The exposure of forum users to the profiles could be done in many ways, but I think a grid of image + crucial info boxes, one for each profile, sortable and rankable according to different categories or metrics, would be especially easy to navigate, enabling users browsing the profiles to find those they are especially well-equipped to advise or might want to partner...

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I was interviewed in yesterday’s 80,000 hours podcast: Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives. As I say in the podcast, there’s good evidence that this is a cost-effective way to save lives. Many peer-reviewed articles show...

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Thanks a lot for the detailed response Dean! The details on the motivational help that nurses provide make it clear that there's much less of an arbitrage opportunity/free lunch than I'd hoped (as is often the case with mere info).

Thanks again for all the great work (including on OD, I learned a lot from where India goes)!

Tl;dr:

  • Leaf supports exceptional teenagers to explore how they can do the most good.
  • We’ve run 3 residential programmes and 4 different types of online fellowship: general to having high positive impact, focused on university decision-making, cause-specific, and subject
...
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2
John Salter
Can you tell us a little more about your most promising and median fellows? How old are they? What are your selection criteria and how did they fare against them?

I have info about these sorts of things in the full doc if you'd like access. Just can't share it all fully publicly for various reasons (and didn't want to spend the time required to make a full public version that I'd be happy sharing).

2
Joseph Lemien
It's great to see that your efforts are expanding and paying off, and I'm looking forward to seeing Leaf's future development. Bravo on all of your hard work so far.