Looking for cofounders.

Educate-Liberate Foundation (ELF) is a non-profit, focused on advancing Individual Freedom and Social Peace through Education.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison, said Victor Hugo. This makes logical sense, if a school can create such characters in students, who can acquire skills, apply them in the real world to solve problems of the society and uphold righteousness can make this world peaceful and prosperous.

By training the next generation on how to handle success and failure, how to keep the inner voice positive and to develop values that are higher order and altruistic. Making the world a happy place, reducing crime, drug addiction and building an overall high trust society.

Our current work:

➔ Workshop for students on Self esteem and Logical reasoning.

➔ Training program for teachers on Transactional analysis and Axiology. ➔ Quality Audits for schools, using the 12-vector framework to

scientifically determine the degree of excellence of any school.

In the pipeline:

➔ Development of a Hybrid-AI Teacher Evaluation System (TES) that can interactively assess the teacher's skills, expertise, style, and method.

➔ Research on alternative Pedagogy to enhance learning outcomes.

The training is delivered by Sundararajan Krishnaswamy, who served as the Chief Education Officer for a group of 26 schools and his team of specialised Teachers.

● Workshop on Circadian Rhythm (2019)

● Online Training on Transaction Analysis (2021)

Goals for 2024:

➔ Conduct workshops for teachers and students in 20 schools across the state.

➔ Recruit 2 developers for the AI Teacher Evaluation System (TES).

➔ Publish Instruction manual on Pedagogy.

➔ Register under Indian Trusts Act, 1882.

Contact Details

Anand Jeevanandham

+91 9900236836 contact.educate.liberate@gmail.com

F2, Skyvine Apartment, 13th main road

Anna Nagar, Chennai, India 600040.

Hello all,

I don't dare posting on the EA forum for now but if you guys think this is interesting and not stupidly controversial, I might do it! I am working for an EA org, as a strategist. We focus a lot on AI safety since the OpenPhil funding is definitely heading there. We could do some cause-area diversification but my colleagues are pushing for AI safety.

I have read what is recommended to make my mind on how pressing working on AI safety is. Boström, Ngo, you name them. I have been to SF and talked to many EA orgs. I have seen a lot of incompetence but mostly a lot of blind, blind, blind deferring. Specifically to karnofsky. When asked, people are unable to say exactly why AI is so pressing--how truly existential the risk is. But they go, and the funding and the prestige follows.

I am on the fence. I understand this is important. I agree. But i don't think it's the most pressing. And more importantly we are focusing on a lot of technical stuff and not so much on who is really concerned and will really suffer. Impact is very loosely measured in these orgs. There is no expectation of impact measurement. We talk about alignement, but we barely talk about the fact that we are here in the first place because men like to play with toys and make money, basically. Again, we act as a band-aid, not really challenging the whole reason as to why AI has come to represent such a risk.

So. I am wondering. If I should just quit EA and go toward an area that has been proven as efficient and impactful (like effective charities or animal welfare), or should I go into AI ethics? What is even there? What kind of roles exist in terms of effective AI ethics?

I suspect this is beyond paygrade of the sub, but if you have anyone who you think does good work on AI and ethics, or any thought that could help, please let me know!

As a non-person, it's difficult to find any organization that just needs obedient drones.
What's more, most organizations expect people to come to them and apply, rather than the other way around.

What's the most effective organization at applying arbitrary numbers of non-persons and non-agentic beings like myself to required tasks? It would have to be something that uptakes people like me with no barriers to entry, scales without limit, and so on.

As far as I know, EA has nothing for this.
I have a CS degree, I'm ex-Google, I have 0 monetary needs, and my only desire is to be exploited for the gratification of humanity.

Hi! I’m the founder of a new research and policy organization that’s focused on the opportunity of breakthrough treatments for addiction to end the opiate crisis and save hundreds of thousands of lives each year.

Here’s our brand-new substack, we have a bunch of posts coming soon: Curing Addiction: News, Strategy, and Medical Breakthroughs.

We are a mostly volunteer group of researchers, writers, data scientists, biologists, and more. This group has come together from posts on EA forum and 80,000 Hours. We’re looking for more allies and collaborators, particularly MDs, PhDs, data scientists, graphic designers, and health policy experts. Please be in touch! Email address below.

Our argument: curing addiction should be a global priority

Here’s the core of the argument that we’ll be building over the next few months:

• Alcohol, cigarettes, and opiates kill over 10 million people a year worldwide and we believe the ripple effects of addiction have tremendously negative social consequences, including the drug war, crime, domestic violence, social distrust, and massive losses in productivity and economic growth.
• Drug use disorders are the number 2 source of DALYs in the United States according to the WHO!
• Fentanyl is extremely easy to smuggle because it is 40X smaller than heroin. It is rapidly spreading worldwide. It is much more likely to cause an accidental overdose because of its potency and combinability with stimulants (see chart below).
• Current drug war and treatment policies are not working nearly well enough, especially in the fentanyl era. Overdose deaths have grown much worse in the past 10 years.
• Opiate addiction alone costs the United States $1.5 trillion a year according to Congress, and yet we only spend $1B on new medication development. There is a tremendous ROI opportunity from investing in better drug addiction treatments.
• Private pharma companies are disincentivized to pursue novel treatments— they doubt the profitability, insurance regulations make it unlikely that they will recoup costs, clinical trials are extremely expensive for brain-related medications, and big pharma is avoidant of trials with unstable populations. This is all fixable through policy changes and incentives.
• Increasing spending on addiction medication development from $1B to $10B a year in the US combined with pharma incentives would have incredible long-term impacts for the whole world, both socially and economically. We can develop real and lasting cures for addiction.
• There are incredible treatments in development, including opiate vaccines, non-addictive painkillers, and especially GLP-1 drugs for reducing addiction to alcohol, cigarettes, and opiates but they all need funding and focus to get through Phase 1, 2, 3 trials. Our post on Curing Addiction is about new GLP-1 research, which may be on the brink of revolutionizing addiction treatment.
• Success with a cure for addiction would benefit the whole world, for generations. We have a chance to effectively end this scourge permanently, as we’ve done for many other diseases.

Policy and market failures

One example of a market failure that we believe is fixable through bipartisan legislation: when a novel non-addictive painkiller is approved in the US, insurance companies and government payers will only pay for the drug if the clinicians can show that cheaper, existing drugs (opiates) are ineffective for the patient. This means that we continue to create new opiate addictions when people receive medical treatment and the massive social costs of these new addictions are pushed onto society as a negative externality by the insurance companies.

How to fix this?

Let’s say a pharma company has a new non-addictive painkiller and they know that sales will be limited because low-cost existing generic painkillers (opiates) will be used as the first-line treatment. The medication itself is cheap to produce but the company needs to charge a high price since use will be so limited. The government also knows this and both the company and the government use standard methods to calculate roughly $400M in expected sales during the drugs patent period. The government can then step in and offer the company, for example, a $500M minimum guarantee in exchange for the company selling the drug at a low cost so that it is available to everyone as a first line therapy. Insurance companies can be required to cover it at this new low cost price. The result is that the company makes more money than they would currently and the government makes a very small investment that prevents thousands of new addictions and has huge ROI for society.

These are the types of policy obstacles we want to identify and address!

Our progress

In just the past few months, we have:

• Brought together a smart and wonderful group of folks to work on this.
• Presented to the policy staff of a US Senator who has been active on opiate legislation.
• Met with doctors, scientists, and clinicians working in hospitals, pharma, and addiction research.
• Interviewed clinicians and service providers working with patients.
• Written several articles that will be published soon on our substack, Curing Addiction (…did I mention that you should subscribe??)

Help we’re looking for

We are looking for people to join our effort:

• MDs and PhDs who have experience in addiction or pain and believe in what we are doing. Even if you are very time limited, you can make a tremendous impact by being available as an advisor or doing calls with us when we speak to policymakers.
• Experts in this field who are interested in working on research and writing projects.
• Data scientists, health policy experts, global health experts, people with experience doing economic modeling and forecasting. Each incidence of addiction has tremendous downstream economic costs so the ROI on preventing or curing addiction is far higher per person than most diseases.
• Outreach, graphic design, coalition building, marketing.
• Excellent writers who understand both science and policy and politics and some level of depth.

Specific types of tasks:

• Science writing for our substack— smart, funny, rationalish, engaging.
• Modeling the health and economic impact of novel addiction and pain medications.
• Outreach to organizations in order to build a coalition to push for legislation.
• Data science, chart creation.
• Party planning….?

We are hoping that you will:

• Follow our work on the substack.
• Be in touch if you want to join the effort.
• Help us find funding to hire a full-time science writer and other research support.

Thanks for reading! Please be in touch! addictionpolicyinitiative@gmail.com

Official website and organization branding coming soon…

Hi everyone, there are a couple of pieces that I am sure I have seen somewhere but now can't find and I wondered if anyone can help me find them.

The first one is from some kind of grantmaking body and explains why they try to minimize the time the applicants spend both on completing application forms and on reporting.

The second one explains why effective altruism-related organisations often publicly acknowledge their past mistakes on a dedicated page of their website.

Thanks in advance!

Hey! We're Applied Philosophy & Effective Altruism at Ohio State. :)

We're a new student organization hoping to find some interested people to get a good foundation for future semesters! If you're not familiar with what effective altruism is, it's a set of ideas and a community that aims to use reasoning and evidence to do the best that we can to help others. On April 3rd at 5:45 guest speaker Dr. Aaron Yarmel give a talk and lead a discussion on the foundational ideas of effective altruism and what he thinks is particularly valuable about them.

State flagship universities are dramatically underrepresented in the effective altruism community. So I'm hoping that our organization can be part of the movement to change this. (I heavily recommend reading Joseph Lamien's great post about this here.) Even if you are nowhere near Columbus, Ohio, we're looking for tips and to cooperate and meet up with in the future.

Right now, growth is our primary goal, so we're looking for all the help we can get.

Introduction:

Effective altruism is a philosophy and community focused on using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible.

While there are many EA clubs throughout the country and the world, we wanted to take a more broad and interactive approach than is typical of similar organizations, expecting students to give suggestions and vehemently debate their viewpoints on how to achieve a better world.

Our club is interdisciplinary and intersects with philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, law, and many more topics, so feel free to come no matter your major! We're open to everyone. :)

Event Information:

Learn more at Effective Altruism at Ohio State’s introduction event on Wednesday, April 3rd at 5:45 PM in Denney Hall 265! Dr. Aaron Yarmel will lead a talk and discussion introducing the basic ideas and philosophical underpinnings of effective altruism and their implications.

The main event will be the talk given by Dr. Aaron Yarmel. Half of the talk will be a presentation and half of it will be an open discussion with attendees. Cookies and drinks will be provided. After the talk, information about how to get involved and learn more will be given for those who are interested!

Schedule:

• #1: Introduction to Effective Altruism
• #2: Value Systems, Thinkers, and Differing Conceptions of the Good
• #3: The Future, Part I: Existential Risks and other Negative Outcomes
• #4: The Future, Part II: What Should We Desire For It?
• #5: Unexamined Moral Atrocities and Cause X: Righteousness, Evil, and Normality
• #6: Rights and Wrongs for Humanity: A Broad Overview
• #7: Rights and Wrongs for Non-Humans: A Broad Overview
• #8: Conclusion, Reflection, and Future Plans

More information on this will be provided at the meeting.

Leadership:

• Our president, Jacob Corsi, is an undergraduate at the university whose present research focuses on international relations, law, bioethics, political economy, and moral atrocities. He is majoring in economics & political science with secondary academic disciplines in statistics & history.
• Our advisor, Aaron Yarmel, is the Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Human Values at Ohio State. His research focuses on utilitarianism, social change, and philosophy for children. He is the founding director of Madison Public Philosophy. Yarmel has been involved in EA since 2015 through his research, guest speaking, workshops, and as an EAGx conference organizer.
• James Markley is our Vice President. He is passionate about Effective Altruism!
• Vansh Jani is our Treasurer and helps with running the club.
• Our lead organizer, Jess Cosakis, is a double major in Computer Science & Engineering.

Please reach out if you have any questions, comments or concerns.

While I do believe in EA, I can't help but feel like the whole movement focuses on people's individual responsibility to help those in need, without questioning *why* they're in need.

Maybe by donating money to charitable causes, we're just offering bandaid solutions, while this entire problem could easily be solved if we stopped having a system where Western companies have people in the Global South working in terrible conditions for their own profit. As Parenti said, poor countries are not 'underdeveloped', they're over-exploited.

On the top of my head, I can think of the following reasons to do that:

Democratize Solutions: When patents are freely available, a wider range of people and organizations can access and build upon existing ideas. This democratization could accelerate progress in various fields, and we could control what areas to help in relation to others.

Enhancing Incentives for Innovation: When patents are freely accessible, organizations can foster innovation and collaboration. By removing financial barriers associated with patents, inventors receive recognition and remuneration for their ideas. This incentivizes creativity and problem-solving.

Easy Evaluation of Impact: The impact of releasing patents to the public domain is straightforward to assess. Unlike complex proprietary licensing agreements, open access allows for transparent evaluation.

Cost-Effective Implementation (with Caveats): Implementing this strategy doesn’t necessarily require significant financial investment. It’s a relatively simple process compared to other approaches. However, I acknowledge my uncertainty about its effectiveness and potential drawbacks.

At first, I thought about naming this “The Case for Buying Patents and Putting Them on Public Domain.” But I quickly came to terms with the fact that I’m not qualified enough to make this case properly, and I’m also not quite sure it is a good idea to be honest.

So I think it’s more productive to frame this as a question: Is this be a good idea? Is it obviously bad and in what ways? Is it not necessarily harmful but not effective either?

Hello! We're Applied Philosophy & Effective Altruism at Ohio State and looking for other EA-affiliated individuals and clubs to get in contact with in the Northeast/Midwest. :)

State flagship universities are dramatically underrepresented in the effective altruism community. So I'm hoping that our organization can be part of the movement to change this. (I heavily recommend reading Joseph Lamien's great post about this here.) Even if you are nowhere near Columbus, Ohio, we're looking for tips and to cooperate and meet up with in the future.

Right now, growth is our primary goal, so we're looking for all the help we can get.

We're a new EA student organization hoping to find some interested people to get a good foundation for future semesters! If you're not familiar with what effective altruism is, it's a set of ideas and a community that aims to use reasoning and evidence to do the best that we can to help others. On April 3rd at 5:45 guest speaker Dr. Aaron Yarmel give a talk and lead a discussion on the foundational ideas of effective altruism and what he thinks is particularly valuable about them.

Introduction:

Effective altruism is a philosophy and community focused on using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible.

While there are many EA clubs throughout the country and the world, we wanted to take a more broad and interactive approach than is typical of similar organizations, expecting students to give suggestions and vehemently debate their viewpoints on how to achieve a better world.

Our club is interdisciplinary and intersects with philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, law, and many more topics, so feel free to come no matter your major! We're open to everyone. :)

Event Information:

Learn more at Effective Altruism at Ohio State’s introduction event on Wednesday, April 3rd at 5:45 PM in Denney Hall 265! Dr. Aaron Yarmel will lead a talk and discussion introducing the basic ideas and philosophical underpinnings of effective altruism and their implications. The main event will be the talk given by Dr. Aaron Yarmel. Half of the talk will be a presentation and half of it will be an open discussion with attendees. Cookies and drinks will be provided. After the talk, information about how to get involved and learn more will be given for those who are interested!

Schedule:

• #1: Introduction to Effective Altruism
• #2: Value Systems, Thinkers, and Differing Conceptions of the Good
• #3: The Future, Part I: Existential Risks and other Negative Outcomes
• #4: The Future, Part II: What Should We Desire For It?
• #5: Unexamined Moral Atrocities and Cause X: Righteousness, Evil, and Normality
• #6: Wrongs Done To Humans: A Broad Overview
• #7: Wrongs Done To Non-Humans: A Broad Overview
• #8: Conclusion, Reflection, and Future Plans

More information on this will be provided at the meeting.

Leadership:

• Our president, Jacob Corsi, is an undergraduate at the university whose present research focuses on international relations, law, bioethics, political economy, and undiscovered moral atrocities.
• Our advisor, Aaron Yarmel, is the Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Human Values at Ohio State. His research focuses on utilitarianism, social change, and philosophy for children. He is the founding director of Madison Public Philosophy. Yarmel has been involved in EA since 2015 through his research, guest speaking, workshops, and as an EAGx conference organizer.
• James Markley is our Vice President. He is passionate about Effective Altruism!
• Vansh Jani is our Treasurer and helps with running the club.
• Our lead organizer, Jess Cosakis, is a double major in Computer Science & Engineering.

More information:

Please reach out if you have any questions, comments or concerns at corsi.42@osu.edu!

Form link:

https://forms.gle/UjpsAbFkM2NSEs3w6

Please fill out this form to let us know that you're interested in coming! You can still attend the event without filling out this form but we'd greatly appreciate it if you did.

Other Links:

Our Club Email: effectivealtruismosu@gmail.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EAatOSU

GroupMe: https://groupme.com/join_group/93249686/pBBYjfKe

You can join our mailing list here.

Worldview:

Reducing extreme suffering might be the single most important thing in my worldview. One notable distinction compared to EA priorities is that I care so much more about the severity reduction in any first-person subjective experience compared to the quantity reduction across several subjective experiences. Essentially, my priority is more geared towards reducing the degree of suffering experienced by any living entity rather than the most suffering total. One way to think of this is that I would save one living being from extreme physical torture rather than billions from getting punched in the face. Lower forms of suffering and welfare fail to ever reach the importance of extreme suffering. In some sense, existence can be judged by how well off its very worst living beings are, and I want to devote whatever I can to bringing the lowest level up impartial to what the living being is or when they exist in time.

Main Question: Does anybody share a similar worldview or have any suggestions based on this information?

Given this worldview, what would be the top cause areas to focus on or donate to? I see wild animal suffering, factory farming, and S-Risks as some potential EA cause areas that may align with this since the severity of suffering in these cases is very high (in addition to the scale). However, I can also imagine non-EA cause areas like ending physical torture, aid for areas where there is extreme violence, and other small-scale but extremely severe forms of cruelty and suffering.

Secondary Question: If you'd like to point out any potentially problematic conclusions from this worldview, I'm also happy to consider that angle athough I think I'm mostly fine with the unintuitive consequences. Open to changing my mind though.

https://www.wythamabbey.org/farewell

https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/our-progress-in-2023-and-plans-for-2024/#id-wytham-abbey

​

I thought I saw one on Wikipedia's store before

I generally feel anti-fanatical for individual decisions with low probabilities of extreme utilities.

Yet I don't really know how to make a moral argument for it, other than "when confronted with one action that is almost certainly significantly better and another that has a tiny probability of being infinitely better, it feels right to take the first option. This is because I value certainty and it feels more right even from a utilitarian perspective to be actually doing a lot of good rather than having a super uncertain potential doing a bunch of good".

While this argument feels plausible to me, another idea popped into my head. Could someone justify being pro-risk even when the expected value is also in favor of the safer bet? If they said, "It feels right to always take the option with the better payoff even if the expected value is worse because I value the potential for the best possible outcomes", would I really be able to argue against that? The idea feels initially absurd, yet is there anything morally different from my principles which make anti-fanatacism legitimate which are absent from their principles which justify their gambling-loving moral ideology?

​

This might read like I'm having a bit of a stroke so feel free to ask follow up questions if you don't understand what I'm saying.

Thanks

Short answer: Food transformation!

I'm a cultivated meat senior scientist at GFI. I want to change the food system by revolutionizing the way we produce food!

But I also think that many big change makers, such as future funders, alt protein scientists, lawyers, investors, policymakers, etc. come from universities.

How could I multiply my impact?

I thought about this a lot. And I found a high impact but neglected issue in food transformation! It's the universities!

We are actively missing opportunities in universities because we don't have the infrastructure to SYSTEMATICALLY train and educate the future leaders. And I made it my mission to fix this!

If you are interested in learning more about my strategy, please read my post on EA's forum and give me feedback!

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/M8FPepsT7T2vo4Pc5/help-allied-scholars-reach-millions-of-students