Preventing the spread of false ideas on social media
New releases
Wild animal suffering
Promoting positive values
Risks from malevolent actors
Kuhan Jeyapragasan on effective altruism university groups
In this episode of 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Kuhan Jeyapragasan about effective altruism university groups.
From 2015 to 2020, Kuhan did an undergrad and then a master’s in maths and computer science at Stanford — and did a lot to organise and improve the EA group on campus.
Rob and Kuhan cover:
- The challenges of making a group appealing and accepting of everyone
- The concrete things Kuhan did to grow the successful Stanford EA group
- Whether local groups are turning off some people who should be interested in effective altruism, and what they could do differently
- Lessons Kuhan learned from Stanford EA
- The Stanford Existential Risks Initiative (SERI)
Who this episode is for:
- People already involved in EA university groups
- People interested in getting involved in EA university groups
Who this episode isn’t for:
- People who’ve never heard of ‘effective altruism groups’
- People who’ve never heard of ‘effective altruism’
- People who’ve never heard of ‘university’
‘S-risks’
People working on suffering risks or s-risks attempt to reduce the risk of something causing vastly more suffering than has existed on Earth so far. We think research to work out how to mitigate these risks might be particularly important. You may also be able to do important work by building this field, which is currently highly neglected — with fewer than 50 people working on this worldwide.
Safeguarding liberal democracy
#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
Effective altruism, in a slogan, aims to ‘do the most good.’ Utilitarianism, in a slogan, says we should act to ‘produce the greatest good for the greatest number.’ It’s clear enough why utilitarians should be interested in the project of effective altruism. But what about the many people who reject utilitarianism?
Today’s guest, Andreas Mogensen — senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Global Priorities Institute — does reject utilitarianism, but as he explains, this does little to dampen his enthusiasm for effective altruism.
Andreas leans towards ‘deontological’ or rule-based theories of ethics, rather than ‘consequentialist’ theories like utilitarianism which look exclusively at the effects of a person’s actions.
Like most people involved in effective altruism, he parts ways with utilitarianism in rejecting its maximal level of demandingness, the idea that the ends justify the means, and the notion that the only moral reason for action is to benefit everyone in the world considered impartially.
However, Andreas believes any plausible theory of morality must give some weight to the harms and benefits we provide to other people. If we can improve a stranger’s wellbeing enormously at negligible cost to ourselves and without violating any other moral prohibition, that must be at minimum a praiseworthy thing to do.
In a world as full of preventable suffering as our own, this simple ‘principle of beneficence’ is probably the only premise one needs to grant for the effective altruist project of identifying the most impactful ways to help others to be of great moral interest and importance.
Should you go to law school in the US to have a high-impact career?
Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project
In this episode of 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which he cofounded in 2021. It’s the first project in the world focused on shrimp welfare specifically and now has six full-time staff.
They cover:
- The evidence for shrimp sentience
- How farmers and the public feel about shrimp
- The scale of the problem
- What shrimp farming looks like
- The killing process, and other welfare issues
- Shrimp Welfare Project’s strategy
- History of shrimp welfare work
- What it’s like working in India and Vietnam
- How to help
Who this episode is for:
- People who care about animal welfare
- People interested in new and unusual problems
- People open to shrimp sentience
Who this episode isn’t for:
- People who think shrimp couldn’t possibly be sentient
- People who got called ‘shrimp’ a lot in high school and get anxious when they hear the word over and over again
Civilisation resilience
What could an AI-caused existential catastrophe actually look like?
At 5:29 AM on July 16, 1945, deep in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, the Manhattan Project carried out the world’s first successful test of a nuclear weapon.
From that moment, we’ve had the technological capacity to wipe out humanity.
But if you asked someone in 1945 to predict exactly how this risk would play out, they would almost certainly have got it wrong. They may have thought there would have been more widespread use of nuclear weapons in World War II. They certainly would not have predicted the fall of the USSR 45 years later. Current experts are concerned about India–Pakistan nuclear conflict and North Korean state action, but 1945 was before even the partition of India or the Korean War.
That is to say, you’d have real difficulty predicting anything about how nuclear weapons would be used. It would have been even harder to make these predictions in 1933, when Leo Szilard first realised that a nuclear chain reaction of immense power could be possible, without any concrete idea of what these weapons would look like.
Despite this difficulty, you wouldn’t be wrong to be concerned.
In our problem profile on AI, we describe a very general way in which advancing AI could go wrong. But there are lots of specifics we can’t know much about at this point.
#136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future
- People who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration.
- The future could be very big, very long, and/or very good.
- We can reasonably hope to influence whether people in the future exist, and how good or bad their lives are.
- So trying to make the world better for future generations is a key priority of our time.
This is the simple four-step argument for ‘longtermism’ put forward in What We Owe The Future, the latest book from today’s guest — University of Oxford philosopher and cofounder of the effective altruism community, Will MacAskill.
From one point of view this idea is common sense. We work on breakthroughs to treat cancer or end use of fossil fuels not just for people alive today, but because we hope such scientific advances will help our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as well.
Some who take this longtermist idea seriously work to develop broad-spectrum vaccines they hope will safeguard humanity against the sorts of extremely deadly pandemics that could permanently throw civilisation off track — the sort of project few could argue is not worthwhile.
But Will is upfront that longtermism is also counterintuitive. To start with, he’s willing to contemplate timescales far beyond what’s typically discussed:
If we last as long as a typical mammal species, that’s another 700,000 years. If we last until the Earth is no longer habitable, that’s hundreds of millions of years. If we manage one day to take to the stars and build a civilisation there, we could live for hundreds of trillions of years. […] Future people [could] outnumber us a thousand or a million or a trillion to one.
Do recent breakthroughs mean transformative AI is coming sooner than we thought?
Is transformative AI coming sooner than we thought?
It seems like it probably is, which would mean that work to ensure this transformation goes well (rather than disastrously) is even more urgent than we thought.
In the last six months, there have been some shocking AI advances:
- PaLM exhibited human-level ability to explain jokes
- DALL-E 2 can interpret artistic styles
- Socratic models can combine “common sense” across domains
This caused the live forecast on Metaculus for when “artificial general intelligence” will arrive to plunge — the median declined 15 years, from 2055 to 2040.
You might think this was due to random people on the internet over-updating on salient evidence, but if you put greater weight on the forecasters who have made the most accurate forecasts in the past, the decline was still 11 years.
Last year, Jacob Steinhardt commissioned professional forecasters to make a five-year forecast on three AI capabilities benchmarks. His initial impression was that the forecasts were aggressive, but one year in, actual progress was ahead of predictions on all three benchmarks.
Particularly shocking were the results on a benchmark of difficult high school maths problems. The state-of-the-art model leapt from a score of 7% to 50% in just one year — more than five years of predicted progress. (And these questions were hard — e.g.
#135 – Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine
After a frenetic level of commentary during February and March, the war in Ukraine has faded into the background of our news coverage. But with the benefit of time we’re in a much stronger position to understand what happened, why, whether there are broader lessons to take away, and how the conflict might be ended. And the conflict appears far from over.
So today, we are returning to speak a second time with Samuel Charap — one of the US’s foremost experts on Russia’s relationship with former Soviet states, and coauthor of the 2017 book Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.
As Sam lays out, Russia controls much of Ukraine’s east and south, and seems to be preparing to politically incorporate that territory into Russia itself later in the year. At the same time, Ukraine is gearing up for a counteroffensive before defensive positions become dug in over winter.
Each day the war continues it takes a toll on ordinary Ukrainians, contributes to a global food shortage, and leaves the US and Russia unable to coordinate on any other issues and at an elevated risk of direct conflict.
In today’s brisk conversation, Rob and Sam cover the following topics:
- Current territorial control and the level of attrition within Russia’s and Ukraine’s military forces.
- Russia’s current goals.
- Whether Sam’s views have changed since March on topics like: Putin’s motivations, the wisdom of Ukraine’s strategy, the likely impact of Western sanctions, and the risks from Finland and Sweden joining NATO before the war ends.
- Why so many people incorrectly expected Russia to fully mobilise for war or persist with their original approach to the invasion.
- Whether there’s anything to learn from many of our worst fears — such as the use of bioweapons on civilians — not coming to pass.
- What can be done to ensure some nuclear arms control agreement between the US and Russia remains in place after 2026 (when New START expires).
- Why Sam considers a settlement proposal put forward by Ukraine in late March to be the most plausible way to end the war and ensure stability — though it’s still a long shot.
Risks from atomically precise manufacturing
Both the risks and benefits of advances in atomically precise manufacturing seem like they might be significant, and there is currently little effort to shape the trajectory of this technology. However, there is also relatively little investment going into developing atomically precise manufacturing, which reduces the urgency of the issue.
Expression of interest: Head of Operations
80,000 Hours
80,000 Hours provides research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.
We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.
The internal systems team
This role is on the internal systems team, which is here to build the organisation and systems that support 80,000 Hours to achieve its mission.
We oversee 80,000 Hours’ office, tech systems, organisation-wide metrics and impact evaluation, as well as HR, recruiting, finances, and much of our fundraising.
Currently, we have four full-time staff, some part-time staff, and receive support from the Centre for Effective Altruism (our fiscal sponsor).
The role
As 80,000 Hours’ Head of Operations, you would:
- Oversee a wide range of our internal operations, including team-wide processes, much of our fundraising, our office, finances, tech systems, data practices, and external relations.
- Manage a team of two operations specialists, including investing in their professional development and identifying opportunities for advancement where appropriate.
- Grow your team to build capacity in the areas you oversee,
Open position: Marketer
Applications for this position are now closed.
We’re looking for a new marketer to help us expand our readership and scale up our marketing channels.
We’d like to support the person in this role to take on more responsibility over time as we expand our marketing team.
80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.
We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.
Even so, about 90% of US college graduates have never heard of effective altruism, and we estimate that just 0.5% of students at top colleges are highly engaged in EA. As a marketer with 80,000 Hours, you would help us achieve our goal of reaching all students and recent graduates who might be interested in our work. We anticipate that the right person in this role could help us grow our readership to 5–10 times its current size, and lead to hundreds or thousands of additional people pursuing high-impact careers.
We’re looking for a marketing generalist who will:
- Start managing (and eventually own) our two largest existing marketing channels:
- Sponsorships with people who have large audiences,
#134 – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obey their husbands, and commoners should obey their monarchs.
Wind back 10,000 years and things look very different again. Most hunter-gatherer groups thought men who got too big for their britches needed to be put in their place rather than obeyed, and lifelong monogamy could hardly be expected of men or women.
Why such big systematic changes — and why these changes specifically?
That’s the question best-selling historian Ian Morris takes up in his book, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve. Ian has spent his academic life studying long-term history, trying to explain the big-picture changes that play out over hundreds or thousands of years.
There are a number of possible explanations one could offer for the wide-ranging shifts in opinion on the ‘right’ way to live. Maybe the natural sciences progressed and people realised their previous ideas were mistaken? Perhaps a few persuasive advocates turned the course of history with their revolutionary arguments? Maybe everyone just got nicer?
In Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels Ian presents a provocative alternative: human culture gradually evolves towards whatever system of organisation allows a society to harvest the most energy, and we then conclude that system is the most virtuous one. Egalitarian values helped hunter-gatherers hunt and gather effectively. Once farming was developed, hierarchy proved to be the social structure that produced the most grain (and best repelled nomadic raiders). And in the modern era, democracy and individuality have proven to be more productive ways to collect and exploit fossil fuels.
#133 – Max Tegmark on how a ‘put-up-or-shut-up’ resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection
On January 1, 2015, physicist Max Tegmark gave up something most of us love to do: complain about things without ever trying to fix them.
That “put up or shut up” New Year’s resolution led to the first Puerto Rico conference and Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence — milestones for researchers taking the safe development of highly capable AI systems seriously.
Max’s primary work has been cosmology research at MIT, but his energetic and freewheeling nature has led him into so many other projects that you would be forgiven for forgetting it. In the 2010s he wrote two best-selling books, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and in 2014 founded a non-profit, the Future of Life Institute, which works to reduce all sorts of threats to humanity’s future including nuclear war, synthetic biology, and AI.
Max has complained about many other things over the years, from killer robots to the impact of social media algorithms on the news we consume. True to his ‘put up or shut up’ resolution, he and his team went on to produce a video on so-called ‘Slaughterbots’ which attracted millions of views, and develop a podcast and website called ‘Improve The News’ to help readers separate facts from spin.
But given the stunning recent advances in capabilities — from OpenAI’s DALL-E to DeepMind’s Gato — AI itself remains top of his mind.
You can now give an AI system like GPT-3 the text: “I’m going to go to this mountain with the faces on it. What is the capital of the state to the east of the state that that’s in?” And it gives the correct answer (Saint Paul, Minnesota) — something most AI researchers would have said was impossible without fundamental breakthroughs just seven years ago.