Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement trying to invest time and money in causes that do the most possible good per some unit investment. EA was at one point called optimal philanthropy.of effort. The label applies broadly, including a philosophy, a community, a set of organisations and set of behaviours. Likewise it also sometimes means how to donate effectively to charities, choose one's career, do the most good per $, do good in general or ensure the most good happens.  All of these different framings have slightly different implications.

The basic concept behind EA is that youone would really struggle to donate 100 times more money or time to charity than you currently do but, spending a little time researching who to donate to could have an impact on roughly this order of magnitude. The same argument works for doing good with your career or volunteer hours.

The Best of LessWrong tag is applied to all posts which were voted highly enough in the annual LessWrong review to make it onto the Best of LessWrong page.

• Global Catastrophic Risks
• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
• The Precipice
• Deep Utopia

The Future of Humanity Institute iswas part of the Faculty of Philosophy and the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. Founded in 2005,2005 and shut down in 2024, its director iswas Nick Bostrom. The mission of FHI iswas described on their website:

FHI puts together a wide range of researches, prominent on their original fields, which decided to focus on global questions about the progress and future of humanity, e.g.:humanity.

The FHI iswas an affiliate to LessWrong and Overcoming Bias. Their past activities include holding a conference in 2008 titled Global Catastrophic Risks Conference and publishing a book, also titled multiple books:

• Global Catastrophic Risks.

• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
• The Precipice

• The Straw Vulcan, a talk introducing rationality, by Julia Galef (summary) [TODO: this video has been removed, find a good replacement]
• Vulcan Logic by Hal Finney

A third argument tries to add rigor by considering monetary payoffs. If Beauty's bets about the coin get paid out once per experiment, some argue that she will do best by acting as if the probability is one half.half (while others argue that probability one third gives the correct result if decision theory is correctly applied). If instead the bets get paid out once per awakening, one can again argue about whether or not acting as if the probability is one third has the best expected value.

A tag for conversations with, rather than about, digital minds. This tag needs expansion and checking for duplicate tags; I checked shallowly before creating it. Should it be merged with AI Evaluations?

Dungeons and Data Science, or D&D.Sci, is a series of analytical exercises played on Less Wrong, frequently framed as problems in a D&D style adventuring world.

Generally D&D.Sci exercises will give the playerplayers a set of datasynthetic dataset but not the rules used to generate it, and the playerit: players must extrapolate patterns from the data in order to optimize the solution to some problem. After each exercise there is usually a follow-up post which explains the underlying rules of the scenario and gives a score to each player who participated at the time.

A tag for conversations with, rather than about, digital minds. This tag needs expansion and checking for duplicates.duplicate tags; I checked shallowly before creating it.

A tag for conversations with, rather than about, digital minds. This tag needs expansion and checking for duplicates.

New better link: https://www.aria.org.uk/programme-safeguarded-ai/ 

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are an unsupervised technique for decomposing the activations of a neural network into a sum of interpretable components (often referred to as features). Sparse Autoencoders may be useful interpretability and related alignment agendas. 

For more information on SAEs see:

• Towards Monosemanticy: Decomposing Language Models with Dictionary Learning
• Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Directions in Language Models

Pause AI is an AI advocacy organizing with the aim of pausing AGI research due to concerns about future risks from AI. From their website:

From their website:

"Who are you?

We are a community of volunteers and local communities coordinated by a non-profit that aims to mitigate the risks of AI (including the risk of human extinction). We aim to convince our governments to step in and pause the development of superhuman AI. We do this by informing the public, talking to decision-makers, and organizing protests. We are not affiliated with any company or organization."

• 3 points – if you have 25,000 karma
• 2 points – if you have 1,000 karma
• 1 point  – if you have 0 karma