We've long supported work to use gene drives to stop the spread of malaria, but many of the approaches are fairly invasive. So great to see this new paper in Nature from a grantee about an approach to drive a *naturally occurring malaria resistance gene* through a mosquito pop!

I don't get to write about a lot of good news, but this is a really big deal — the global fur industry has collapsed over the last decade. My rundown on the numbers and how it unfolded: vox.com/future-perfect…

Before I interviewed Lewis Bollard, I had assumed that factory farming was on its way out (especially given new tech like cultivated meat around the corner). Unfortunately this is far from inevitable: factory farms are already incredibly efficient machines for making meat (the

lab-grown meat, non-animal butter, and similar stuff that lets people consume animal products without harming animals is genuinely one of the coolest technological achievements of the contemporary era. i’m not even vegan and it still seems like such an obvious ethical improvement

1/2 When economics papers don’t hold up under scrutiny—which is often—bad research becomes bad policy. One former p-hacker has set out to change the system.

Dwarkesh's factory farming fundraiser has now raised $1.7M! That includes ~100 people giving $1K+. Huge props to the matching donors: Dwarkesh Patel, Patrick Collison, seemay chou, Jed McCaleb, Gaurav Kapadia, Ariel Nessel, Tyler Maule, & the Dahna Foundation. Let's hit $2M!

Some fantastic editorial roles open in the ecosystem right now: 1. Open Philanthropy is hiring an Editor — work with Naina Bajekal 🔸 and a really great comms team

The moral panic over data center water usage is out of control. This is just not that much water:

It seems like there is not enough of a policy response to the fact that, with 57M miles of data, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles experience 85% less serious injuries & 79% less injuries overall than cars with human drivers. 2.4 million are injured & 40k killed in US accidents a year

Very important paper, for two reasons: 1) Key finding: employment *is* falling in early-career roles exposed to LLM automation 2) Shows that administrative data (millions of payroll records) is much better than survey data for questions requiring precision (occupation x age)

I want to frame this whole article.

Some people think Open Philanthropy are luddites because we work on AGI safety, and others think we’re techno-utopians because we work on abundance and scientific progress. We’re neither. Here's why we think safety and accelerating progress go hand in hand, in spite of the tensions:🧵

But the vast majority of our work here is on market and policy failures around worst-case risks posed by AI. We think these risks could be very grave, and that philanthropy is especially well-placed to contribute:

Maybe january and february and march and april and may and june and july and august and september werent my months but october will surely be better!!!!

happy diwali from a very beautiful (and slightly soggy) autumnal london 🪔

Asterisk is hiring a managing editor! This a unique role, at a unique magazine, with the opportunity to heavily shape the feel and direction of Asterisk moving forward. Click to read more and apply. asteriskmag.com/careers

Sad to lose Joe Carlsmith as a colleague but excited for what he'll do next and to keep reading his work. I did not expect to cry when I read his leaving post but this was incredibly moving