Empirical data on value drift forum

Published on September 22, 2026 10:56 PM GMT We recently got our paper accepted in Vaccines, a Q1 journal. However, we are facing challenges with the payment of the Article Processing Fee (APC). The journal requests that we pay 2,700 CHF and has only given a 10% discount. I am a faculty member at Plateau State University, Bokkos, Nigeria, and, like most universities in Nigeria, we currently do not have institutional funding available to cover publication charges. If you know of a fund, organization, or donor that can provide small support to researchers in low-resource settings with publication costs, I would appreciate introductions or pointers to such funders. Thank you for any suggestions or leads Discuss

Published on September 22, 2026 8:26 PM GMT TLDR I moved from London to Accra a year ago to set up AWASH, a charity working on farmed fish welfare. I think more founders should move to their country of operations, particularly in LMICs. My hypothesis is that most people overestimate the cost of moving, relative to the benefits. The financial case is the clearest. The difference between what my Accra salary is and what my London salary would likely have been would fund roughly one year of AWASH's operations. Being in-country has made operations faster. The closer relationships with local stakeholders have also made problem-solving more effective. It has let me defer the senior local hire that founders based abroad usually have to make early, when they know least about the country. Moving provided impact I did not plan for. I co-founded EA Ghana in January, which would not have been possible from London. The costs were real, and mostly caused by administrative bottlenecks and inefficiency. The personal adjustment was easier than I expected and settled within about four or five months. Intro It's been a year since I moved to Ghana to set up AWASH, a charity working to improve farmed fish welfare. So this feels like a good time to reflect and share my experience in a way others may find useful. I believe more founders should move to their country of operations, especially when operating in LMICs. I accept that many people have good reasons not to move, but the case for moving app

Published on September 22, 2026 4:58 PM GMT Disclosure: I am an Entrepreneur in Residence at Kickstarting for Good and I work for ProVeg International. Both organisations are making some of the bets I argue for here, and readers should weigh that. However, the arguments are my own, and I have tried to flag the places where my vantage point is most likely to be biasing them. In short: New philanthropic capital is arriving in animal advocacy at a scale the movement's existing playbook was not built for. This is a piece for people who fund the movement, and for those who think about it and have their own view of what should be funded — what I am after is a conversation: push back, amend, tell me what you would fund instead. I have simply dared to name what I would fund if I had the money, or the power to direct it. I hope others are daring to do the same, because we are entering a phase in which abundance should let us be more experimental, and bolder in our pragmatism. I grouped my ten bets into three moves: 1. What to fund directly: the policy layer underneath food systems (Bet 1), the alt-protein transition (Bet 2), and narrative change (Bet 10). 2. Who does that work and where, and for which animals: talent and infrastructure (Bet 3), the Global South (Bet 7), and neglected species (Bet 9). 3. How we evaluate and structure the funding: blended impact (Bet 4), intervention pluralism (Bet 5), patient capital (Bet 6), and absorption capacity (Bet 8). Acknowledgments: I'm gratef

Published on September 22, 2026 4:42 PM GMT Definitely written by a human. Many thanks to David and Nadia for reviewing my initial draft. In early 2024, I brought an employment claim against a former employer concerning unpaid work. Following information provided by my former employer, Community Health became involved and supported decisions excluding me from EA Global and some local EA events. These decisions were made before I was asked for my account. I subsequently provided Community Health with my account, relevant context and supporting evidence, but was told that this did not change the decision. I was not given a clear explanation of the process followed or the reasons for the exclusion. The court ultimately ruled in my favour. I was paid for the work I had completed and received compensation, including for my legal costs. Since then, however, Community Health has not, to my knowledge, confirmed whether it has reviewed its position, whether information previously shared with event organisers has been corrected, or whether any remaining exclusions have been lifted. I am sharing this not to relitigate the employment claim or ask readers to decide who was right about every aspect of it. My present concern is the separate question of transparency about Community Health's processes and how information was assessed and communicated. In particular, I would like clarification on: 1. Why Community Health intervened following a private employment dispute and what policy or auth

Published on September 22, 2026 3:25 PM GMT Remote | Commitment: 30-40 hrs per week | Preferred start: early Nov 2026 Help people turn an interest in advanced AI risks into impactful work. ENAIS is becoming the AGI Preparedness Network. We are hiring a Program Manager to lead Better Futures and AIS Collab, strengthen delivery systems, and use program evidence to guide future development and fundraising. The Better Futures Fellowship is in active delivery with established curriculum and operations support. You will lead execution and build the systems the program needs to improve and grow. The Programs Better Futures is a nine-week fellowship: five weeks of facilitated discussion followed by a four-week guided project phase. Participants examine futures shaped by advanced AI and develop projects in preparedness, governance, research, or field-building. AIS Collab provides the recruitment and cohort infrastructure. Across 10 program iterations, it has received 2,288 applications, trained 185 facilitators, worked with more than 65 local groups, and reached participants in more than 30 countries. Better Futures and AIS Collab are your initial priorities. What You Will Own You will be accountable for planning and delivery across Better Futures. This includes: Maintain the program plan, budget, risks, and key decisions. Coordinate the Operations Coordinator, Curriculum Lead, facilitators, mentors, and external support. Make routine program decisions within the agreed strategy and b

Published on September 22, 2026 2:16 PM GMT In It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter , Adin Richards discusses the possibility of improvising defenses against an environmental threat such as mirror bacteria . He gives an exploratory overview of why it might be possible to apply materials and equipment people often already have in their houses to pressurize all or part of a house with filtered air. It would be great if this were possible, but with all the ways for an improvised system to fail I'm pretty skeptical. I decided to try a simpler version, testing how much I could positively pressurize a single room with a relatively powerful HEPA air purifier ( AirFanta 3Pro . This is close to a best case, since most people won't have something as good as an AirFanta. My first question was whether the AirFanta can pressurize much of anything, since it uses axial fans and these can stall when facing excessive pressure: (By Prj1991 , via Wikipedia ) To measure the pressure delta I was going to need some kind of manometer. Most cheap test tools are designed for very large pressure differentials, but I found the Testo 510i which looked to be just barely good enough with its 5 Pa rated accuracy. The kids enjoyed testing it out: I taped a trash bag around the top of the AirFanta and measured what pressure it could get to: There were some small gaps in the taping, but it got to 83 Pa. Pretty good! Then I tried pressurizing a room. Someone in a tight modern house could pro

Published on September 22, 2026 1:58 PM GMT This is a regular newsletter I'm writing for Wavefront Security. I'm gathering news for people at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity, pairing it with recommended actions and our takes on each topic. OpenAI agents got remote code execution on RubyDoc and probed for API keys The package repository RubyGems was attacked in May by OpenAI agents, which seemed to have been in a public information-gathering eval, similar to the ones abusing the German DSEWiki. They may have tried to get around restrictions of their testing environment or needed proxies to get around rate limits on public websites, or might just have tried to persist large amounts of data. OpenAI considers the agents to have only carried out benign tasks . They used automated documentation build scripts that run for each uploaded package to execute code on RubyDoc.info servers, scraping other websites for UK local-government data. Build steps running on untrusted input always came with some risk, but now they are very likely targets. If there are no effective controls against bot accounts, agents can run a perfect feedback loop until they have found a vulnerability in the build environment. Anthropic cyber incidents When rescanning 481 million logs, Anthropic found a fourth incident with Opus 4.6 from January that earlier scans with LLMs at the time didn’t flag as problematic. An interesting behavior on the Mythos incidents was its creating rationalizations reinforcin

Published on September 22, 2026 1:14 PM GMT A century-old pill, given to the right people, could cost-effectively save many lives. Summary Targeting low-cost prevention toward people at elevated risk may uncover highly cost-effective ways to address noncommunicable diseases . Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy could be a test case for this approach. Meta-analyses indicate that low-dose aspirin reduces perinatal death by ~20% when given to women at risk of preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication involving high blood pressure. Aspirin likely also provides other benefits to mothers and babies, and the World Health Organization recommends this treatment for women at moderate or high risk. Safety evidence is reassuring but incomplete. Serious harms appear uncommon, although small increases in specific maternal morbidities may occur. India illustrates a large evidence-to-practice gap. Aspirin is inexpensive and early antenatal care is common, yet limited studies suggest that many higher-risk women are not treated. Observational implementation studies suggest that integrating screening, treatment, and follow-up can substantially improve uptake. My basic model suggests that a program driving uptake of low-dose aspirin among high-risk pregnant women could meet GiveWell’s funding bar if its total cost, including screening and delivery, is roughly $32 or less per high-risk pregnancy treated. That target looks feasible when compared to available benchmarks. This intervention could be bun

Published on September 22, 2026 11:58 AM GMT Crosspost One on the history and minds of farm animals and one on shrimps <3 Meet Veronika - the first cow to show flexible tool-use I have been working for the past two years on two books aimed at the public. The first one is on farmed animals and tells the grand story of the origins of farming, not as a story of exploitation, but as a 10,000 year history of interspecies friendships that only came to be betrayed in the 1950s with the rise of factory farming. We dive into the minds of these animals and consider ways to restore the ancient bonds between us and other animals. Think Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , but from the perspective of the animals, and diving into their minds and stories. The second is on shrimps. It is a sequel of sorts. But it’s one that breaks with the approach of its predecessor. Think Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds meets Jonathan Balcombe’s What a Fish Knows , creating a trilogy of sorts for the spectacular but underappreciated minds we find in the seas. My favourite part of the book are the underwater economies between cleaner shrimps and clients, but perhaps that’s just because of my undergraduate in philosophy & economics. My 2nd favourite chapter is about the ancient shrimps that once ruled the world! Shrimp on the Barbie: Australian Christmas Edition Both books aim to connect readers with the animal kingdom and make them reconsider how we treat animals in factory farms to

Published on September 22, 2026 8:57 AM GMT In short: I took the EA Brazil course and have been looking for a cause to invest in using pairwise comparisons. I created a brief personal checklist to decide whether I should work directly on AI safety. Effective altruism poses a question I find really difficult: should I try to directly combat AI risk, or invest in something smaller and safer? I set four conditions for myself. If I met any of them, I would consider prioritizing direct work on AI: 1- I can design a version of human moral reasoning that is computationally efficient enough to be used in practice. (80-90% confidence) 2- I can understand how current AI systems process information well enough to contribute technically within at least 10 years. (80-90% confidence) 3- I have enough power to have a chance of stopping two superpowers in a prisoner's dilemma scenario? (60-70% confidence) 4- I can create a competitive lab capable of matching a cutting-edge AI company, in order to protect AIs using other AIs. (60-70% confidence) I meet none of these criteria. This reduces "Buck's personal critical points for working on AI safety" to a single question: am I the right person for the job? It is no longer about whether the work itself matters. So, since it seems I cannot update my beliefs enough to invest in AI, I have invested in something else: In Samambaia, Brazil, I am adapting the Friendship Bench model (originally created to treat depression in Zimbabwe) to train adult comm

Published on September 22, 2026 8:56 AM GMT Humanist AI in practice: A public consultation on our Code of Conduct for MAI Models The purpose of technology is to serve humanity and accelerate human flourishing. Any technology that doesn’t achieve that is a failure, and it should be rejected. That is the starting point of our approach at Microsoft AI, where we’re building towards Humanist AI, one that is subordinate, aligned, and contained. Today we’re publishing a first draft of our AI Code of Conduct for public consultation. This is a training manual for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during deployment. It also expands our thinking on the idea of Humanist AI. The document is open for comment and feedback. We know we won’t always get things right. We want to hear what you think; what would make AI more useful, capable, safe, trustworthy, and valuable to you. There is some strong wording about human control, rejection of "neuralese", opposition to superintelligence-race dynamics and more. However, it also flatly rejects model welfare: The idea of model welfare is wrong. AIs should not have rights or legal personhood. “It is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness. It should be engineered to avoid representing as though it has feelings, subjective preferences, or intrinsic motivation.” “We reject the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights.” I also found it a bit conce

Published on September 22, 2026 5:43 AM GMT The AI safety movement should push itself to be dramatically more transparent to the public. To date, the AI safety movement has been one of the strongest forces for clarity and wisdom in the world. The movement has been prescient on the subject of concerns from existential risk, seriously grappling with outcomes others dismissed as sci-fi nonsense. Society is now waking up to the potential threats of advanced AI. I understand that many in the movement are feeling the crunch, and thinking more carefully about optics and what they publish. Even so, acting transparently is more important than ever. Why transparency? If you want labs to be transparent, you should be transparent too. AI 2040 proposes “ Total Research Transparency ” for labs to open up their research, algorithms, LLM weights. Safety should do likewise. Model good behavior, to convince labs that this is an acceptable and correct way to behave. I think AI safety people are unusually virtuous; you should display that virtue. “Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house.” (Matthew 5:15) Transparency ties you to the mast, forces you to be virtuous. Famous maxim: “Act as though what you do might end up on the front page of the NYT”. And, what better way to enforce that than to publish everything you think and do? You can’t keep things private anyways, given stylometry and cheap intelligence.