• Misha and Samotsvety continue to update the community on nuclear risk arising from the Ukraine invasion.

• David Mathers and Alexander Briand join the Arb team! All at the Prague Fall Season, come visit.

• Our in-house philosopher David began criticising classic papers. First: the political economy of digital minds.

• The Criticism and Red-teaming Contest concluded. Winners described here, and Gavin’s reflections here.

• We helped Jan Kulveit write up a better model for collective and uncertain efforts.

As part of Samotsvety Forecasting, Misha estimated the risk arising from near-future artificial intelligence systems. They also took a baseline from a potentially less biased baseline group. The definition used is here.

Holden Karnofsky commissioned us to evaluate the track record of “the Big Three” of science fiction: Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. We formed a team, wrote a pipeline, and processed 475 works (a third of their entire corpus), manually tagging and annotating everything. Asimov is the standout, with roughly 50% accuracy. (What’s the point?: To see if the speculation that effective altruism has switched to has any precedent; if it ever works.)

Holden’s writeup here, our report here. Bug bounty described in the latter. See also Dan Luu’s critique.

Gavin is a judge on a contest awarding cash prizes to new criticisms of effective altruism. It’s serious: we want points from outside the EA bubble and there’s an option to pay you an advance if you need one.

[EDIT: Winners here, Gavin’s writeup here.]

I gave two talks at EAGx Prague. Great fun:

• Epistemic tips for amateurs, generalists, and similar researchers. The video is forthcoming.

Some suggestions up on the EA Forum in the meantime.

• A panel on “Lessons from COVID” with Jan Kulveit (Epidemic Forecasting), Irena Kotikova (MeSES),

and Edouard Mathieu (Our World in Data).

We’re leading a study of AI talent for the Mercatus Center. This goes with the new Emergent Ventures AI tranche. We’ll boost underappreciated researchers and builders; give us leads!

We were commissioned to see how strong the famous superforecasting advantage is. We found less research and less evidence than we expected. We received helpful comments from world experts including Christian Ruhl and Marc Koehler.

Full piece on the EA Forum, or as a podcast.

We helped Jan Kulveit, research scholar at FHI and cofounder of the Epidemic Forecasting initiative, to review the EA response to Covid. He has many interesting general insights into the nature of long-termism and world resilience.

Full sequence on the EA Forum.

Samotsvety estimated nuclear risk arising from the war in Ukraine. Misha was commissioned by CEA to monitor the situation and provide updates. The piece received vigorous feedback, including a dissenting opinion by J. Peter Scoblic. Funded retroactively through the FTX Future Fund regranting program.

Full piece on the EA Forum.

Misha and his Samotsvety colleagues were commissioned to look at the track record of internal prediction markets. “More sure that prediction markets fail to gain adoption than why this is.”

Full piece on the EA Forum.