Ben Norman, Max Maton, Jian Xin Lim and I are working on a Progress Studies Society in London for students/professionals. Our initial experiment is an 8-week in-person project-based fellowship, aimed at helping talented individuals start working on concrete problems relevant to progress studies.

We're looking for lists of relevant project ideas -- similar to what people have done in AI safety (e.g. here and here). The people working on these would be lower context, but dedicated/smart. We would be very grateful if anyone has suggestions :)

Hi, I'm a philosopher specializing in epistemology and rationality. I learned about Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism from my mentor David Deutsch and I helped with his book The Beginning of Infinity. That gives a sense of the general point of view I'm coming from. I have two main things to suggest which are mostly independent but synergize well.

I developed improvements on Critical Rationalism, which I named Critical Fallibilism, which center around evaluating ideas in a binary way using decisive arguments rather than weighing arguments or evidence (which, like induction, doesn't actually work).

And I developed a plan for how to make progress in the world: encourage all public intellectuals to have written debate policies which specify in advance what debates they will accept and how they will behave...

Many technologies can be used in both healthy and unhealthy ways. You can indulge in food to the point of obesity, or even make it the subject of anxiety. Media can keep us informed, but it can also steal our focus and drain our energy, especially social media. AI can help students learn, or it can help them avoid learning. Technology itself has no agency to choose between these paths; we do.

This responsibility exists at all levels: from society as a whole, to institutions, to families, down to each individual. Companies should strive to design healthier products—snack foods that aren’t calorie-dense, smartphones with screen time controls built in to the operating system. There is a role for law and regulation as well, but that is a blunt...

Some people are very interested in neurotechnology, e.g. BCIs, neuromodulation through transcranial direct current stimulation/pulsed ultrasound/magnetic stimulation or even deep brain stimulation.

The applications people seem most excited by in relation to neurotechnology appear to fall into the categories of (1) outputting information from the brain and (2) inputting information into the brain at a higher throughput/higher fidelity/lower latency, as well as the resulting compound ability to (3) send mental gestalts/felt senses/ideas between people. I'll call these "I/O applications".

E.g. a common imagination is that with BCIs, one'd be able to control computers much more quickly and accurately than with a mouse and keyboard, or retrieve arbitrary facts from Wikipedia as-if from long term memory, or send one's own understanding of a complicated political issue to a conversation partner and have them understand ones perspective.

I think those are great goals, and hope people make progress...

The Open Philanthropy Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness (BPP) team is hiring and is also looking for promising new grantees! 

The BPP team's focus is on reducing catastrophic and existential risks from biology -- work that we think is currently neglected by the EA community and requires substantially more effort. While AI risks may be larger, the strategy for mitigating biological risks is both much clearer and likely more tractable, though the cause area is severely lacking in talent to execute well. Notably, we don’t think you need a background in biology to do most of these roles well.

Some of the focus areas they're excited for more work in include: physical transmission suppression, metagenomic sequencing, personal protective equipment, medical countermeasures, capacity building for the biosecurity field, and work at...

[This is a linkpost from https://thegreymatter.substack.com/p/book-review-the-system]

Robert Reich wants you to be angry. He wants you to be furious at the rich, outraged at corporations, and incensed by the unfairness of it all. In his book The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, Reich paints a picture of an America ruled by oligarchs, where democracy is a sham and people are powerless against the machinations of the ultra-wealthy.

It's a compelling narrative. It's also deeply flawed.

This matters because Reich isn't just another pundit. He's a former U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, a Berkeley professor, and a bestselling author with millions of social media followers. "The System" itself became a national bestseller. When someone with his platform and credentials makes sweeping economic claims, people listen. They form...