I think it's not just that it's slower/deeper: my personal sense (which might be just a thing of not requiring much medical care between the ages of 5 and 30) is that the pace at which awesome new stuff is happening in medicines I can buy got much faster in the last few years. If my perception is right, it seems like that requires some explanation of "bio is slower/deeper and also 40 years ago there was a massive breakthru that took 40 years to percolate", and not just "bio is slower/deeper".

This year, we received a $1.6M matching grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which means that the first $1.6M we receive in donations before December 31st will be matched 1:1. We will only receive the grant funds if it can be matched by donations.

Does anyone know (i.e. actually know, not just have a speculative guess) why SFF does this sort of thing? Naively it seems like a weird way to operate from a perspective of maximizing the good done by their donations. Is the reasoning something like "if other people donate to MIRI, that increases our estimate of how valuable MIRI is, and so we want to donate more to it"?

I wonder if it's a thing where it's taking a while for those things to hit. Like, mRNA vaccines are only a couple of years old, GLP-1RAs are in a gradual process of being rolled out, etc. If I think of the category of "awesome newish bio stuff I'd like to use", it seems like most of it becomes widely available to consumers in the near future or last 5 years, with the exception of statins.

Another relevant consideration: I donated some money to political candidates and now I have a bunch of spam emails that cost me more than $3 of annoyance to deal with

Thanks for the bug report! I set the links to just /pdfs/augustine_enchiridion.pdf (and analogous) and didn't realize that would break with cross-posting. Should be fixed now.

You can always be more incentivized to do or avoid things! (no comment on this specific example)

Based on my recollections of being around in 2015, your number from then seems too high to me (I would have guessed there were at most 30 people doing what I would have thought of as AI x-risk research back then). Can I get a sense of who you're counting?

Answer from the abstract of the paper Kat linked in a parallel comment:

Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods.

In particular, vegans/vegetarians are more likely to be left-wing, and left-wing people in the US have higher rates of mental illness.

Thanks for making this! For what it's worth, it looks like 22757.12(d) requires developers to be somewhat transparent about risks from internal deployment, which seems quite interesting to me and I'm surprised didn't make the summary.