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  1. 05/23/2024 In the Media

    80,000 Hours: Matt Clancy on whether science is good

    “Suppose we make these grants, we do some of those experiments I talk about. We discover, for example — I’m just making this up — but we give people superforecasting tests when they’re doing peer review, and we find that you can identify people who are super good at picking science. And then we have this much better targeted science, and we’re making progress at a 10% faster rate than we normally would have. Over time, that aggregates up, and maybe after 10 years, we’re a year ahead of where we would have been if we hadn’t done this kind of stuff.

    Now, suppose in 10 years we’re going to discover a cheap new genetic engineering technology that anyone can use in the world if they order the right parts off of Amazon. That could be great, but could also allow bad actors to genetically engineer pandemics and basically try to do terrible things with this technology. And if we’ve brought that forward, and that happens at year nine instead of year 10 because of some of these interventions we did, now we start to think that if that’s really bad, if these people using this technology causes huge problems for humanity, it begins to sort of wash out the benefits of getting the science a little bit faster.”

  3. 11/01/2023 In the Media

    80,000 Hours Podcast: Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down

    “One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people’s homes, and instead of being transported to a waste management facility or a landfill or something, gets burned at some point, because that’s the fastest way to dispose of it — which really points to poor delivery of public services. But this is ubiquitous in virtually every small- or even medium-sized city. It happens in larger cities too, in this part of the world.”

  4. 07/31/2023 In the Media

    80,000 Hours Podcast: Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they’re no smarter than humans, and his four-part playbook for AI risk

    “I think a lot of the case for planning things out in advance — trying to tell stories of what might happen, trying to figure out what kind of regime we’re going to want and put the pieces in place today, trying to figure out what kind of research challenges are going to be hard and do them today — I think a lot of the case for that stuff being so important does rely on this theory that things could move a lot faster than anyone is expecting.”

  5. 05/19/2023 In the Media

    80,000 Hours podcast: Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion

    “…if you really think that there’s a good chance that you’re not understanding things, then something that you could do that at least probably has some shot of helping is to put future generations in a better position to solve these questions — once they have lots of time and hopefully are a whole lot smarter and much more informed than we are…”

  6. 05/12/2023 In the Media

    80,000 Hours podcast: Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us

    “I don’t know yet what suite of tests exactly you could show me, and what arguments you could show me, that would make me actually convinced that this model has a sufficiently deeply rooted motivation to not try to escape human control. I think that’s, in some sense, the whole heart of the alignment problem.”

  7. 05/05/2023 In the Media

    80,000 Hours podcast: Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world

    “By the time that the AIs can do 20% of cognitive tasks in the broader economy, maybe they can already do 40% or 50% of tasks specifically in AI R&D. So they could have already really started accelerating the pace of progress by the time we get to that 20% economic impact threshold.

    At that point you could easily imagine that really it’s just one year, you give them a 10x bigger brain. That’s like going from chimps to humans — and then doing that jump again. That could easily be enough to go from [AIs being able to do] 20% [of cognitive tasks] to 100%, just intuitively. I think that’s kind of the default, really.”

  8. 03/16/2023 In the Media

    Inside Philanthropy: How Effective is Effective Altruism? A Deep Dive Into Two of Open Philanthropy’s EA-Inspired Programs

    “Bollard appreciates the progress, particularly in corporate and legislative arenas, but cautioned that there’s still much work ahead. Domestically, there’s no national law, and the meat industry has tremendous power. Some retailers are farther along than others. Globally, protections are still ‘either missing or growing.’

    As work continues, ‘The jury is still out,’ he said.

  10. 01/06/2022 In the Media

    Devex: Open Philanthropy launches programs for South Asia, global aid work

    “Influential research and grant-making organization Open Philanthropy announced this week that it has hired lead officers for its first ‘new causes’ in more than five years: South Asian air quality and global aid advocacy. The group expects the two programs to support its efforts to cost-effectively direct millions of dollars toward grants aimed at boosting incomes or increasing the years of healthy life for the world’s lowest-income people.”