EA - EA and LW Forums Weekly Summary (5 - 11 Sep 22’) by Zoe Williams

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (5 - 11 Sep 22’), published by Zoe Williams on September 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Supported by Rethink Priorities This is part of a weekly series - you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. If you'd like to receive these summaries via email, you can subscribe here. Top Readings / Curated A new section, designed for those without the time to read all the summaries. Everything here is also within the relevant sections later on so feel free to skip if you’re planning to read it all.Methodology - I’ve pulled out a few posts I think offer some particularly new and interesting ideas, or would be useful to have more people giving feedback on. This is purely based on my personal opinion. Keen on any thoughts in the comments if this section is useful or not! A California Effect for Artificial Intelligence By henryj The California Effect occurs when companies adhere to California regulations even outside California’s borders. The author evaluates three types of AI regulation California could adopt, and finds two 80% likely to produce a california effect - regulating training data through data privacy, and risk-based regulation like that proposed by the EU. A full research paper is linked, the results of a summer research fellowship. Developing Next Gen PPE to Reduce Biorisks by AndyGraham, tsmilton The authors are engineers planning to apply to LTTF for funding to run a feasibility study on improved PPE, particularly high protection versions (ie. suits). The current versions are bulky, expensive, hard to use, and have changed little since 1979. Feasibility will be primarily research to validate the need and potential impact on GCBRs. If that resolves favorably, they hope to finalize a product within 2-5 years. They’re looking for advice and thoughts - particularly from those with bioexpertise or PPE expertise, or who can help with the grant application. Cause Exploration Prizes: Announcing our prizes Over 150 submissions. Top prize to Organophosphate pesticides and other neurotoxicants by Ben Stewart. Second prize to each of Violence against women and girls by Akhil, Sickle Cell Disease (anonymous) and Shareholder activism by sbehmer. 20 honourable mentions. Post on learnings may come in the future. See section ‘Bonus: winners of Open Philanthropy’s cause exploration prizes’ section below for more detailed summaries. Announcing the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses By Givewell Givewell is looking for critiques on their cost effectiveness analyses. Entries due 31st October, prizes up to 20K + a chance to improve allocation of millions of dollars. Monitoring for deceptive alignment by evhub Requests DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic to actively monitor and run experiments on narrow deceptive alignment (ie. where a model looks aligned only because it’s trying to, for some ulterior motive). Early examples may be relatively easy to detect (eg. because early AIs are bad at it, or defect quickly) and therefore study. This could include monitoring for pre-cursors like when an AI first develops an instrumental goal not to have itself shut down. Concrete things to test models on include if behavior changes with / without oversight, or catching deception at source via interpretability / transparency tools. From twitter: Trials show malaria vaccine gives 80% protection (3 doses + yearly booster). It’s cheap, they have a deal to manufacture 100 million doses a year, and hope to roll it out next year. (link) EA Forum Philosophy and Methodologies An entire category of risks is undervalued by EA [Summary of previous forum post] By Richard Ren The cascading sociopolitical & economic effects of climate change, pandemics, and conflicts are undervalued i...