3 surprises on the EA Forum this week

generally pleasant :)

New cause area?

Akhil wrote a very impressive article on antimicrobial resistance as a cause area. I did not know that antimicrobial resistance killed so many more people than malaria (malaria is around 600k per year)!

Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s identified giving opportunities yet - or at least he didn’t list them. However he is launching a funding circle focused on this cause area, so hopefully him and anyone who chooses to join will identify some great charities making progress on the problem!

That TIME article

Lucretia posted a 44-minute read on “Why I Spoke to TIME Magazine, and My Experience as a Female AI Researcher in Silicon Valley”

She explained a bit about her rationale for writing:

I agree with her, that it’s important to share experiences even if you’re not sure they’re representative.

She writes that a male AI safety researcher repeatedly sexually harassed her. She doesn’t say who and I’m not sure if he’s directly involved with EA. On the one hand, she says the man who harassed her hired an “EA coach” to mediate; on the other hand, in this section, she doesn’t say he was involved in EA (and it seems like this would be the place to say it if he were!).

She feels that the culture of AI safety and by extension EA made it harder to speak about her experiences. For example, she says when a woman spoke out on her behalf, that woman was threatened with reputational damage and several people stopped paying rent to the house she ran. She also says that several AI researchers tried to understand the situation but didn’t take account of their own likely biases, common cultural myths about sexual harassment and assault, or base rates.

She wrote: “My takeaway: The average AI alignment researcher in Silicon Valley does not have good epistemics around sexual harassment or sexual abuse.”

On the other hand, I braved the comments section while writing this post, and the quality seems to have improved significantly from what I imagine the reaction would have been a few years ago - I was pleasantly surprised!

The return of the king

Will MacAskill commented on the EA Forum for the first time in three months.

He was responding to the posted question, “How does AI progress affect other EA cause areas?”

Will said “A few things leap out at me” and then wrote a whole essay. What a legend.

Welcome back, Will!