Not sure what to make of it, but one of 80k hrs top recommendations is Government and policy - here it seems like several top careers could need to consider what party to work for. I might agree that discussions about who to vote for might not be high priority (although I think Rob Wiblin made a really good point that in "swing districts" voting might be really high value in expectation). That said, there might be a trade-off for many people, perhaps even EA as a whole between whether to try to make those issues that are still not partisan (like AI perhaps) stay non-partisan and using our resources to galvanize a political faction around issues that are partisan.
 

Not sure if important and I am sure you have thought of this: I find the sentinel minutes some of the best news sources out there. I would be happy as an individual to pay a small monthly fee to get these.

Also, I would really look forward to reports on future interactions with non-EA/non-X-risk orgs that are in "crisis mode" to see how Sentinel's offering is received by the customers.

Ah that might explain it - it is coming from philosophy not psychology!

Hi Jeff, I have been pondering a similar question: Why is there not more uptake of UV? I suspect it could be down to targeting the wrong initial, beachhead market. While this analogy will fail in many aspects, there was social media before Facebook. However, they did not try to start on elite college campuses, and thus make it "cool" to have social media. Similarly, I am not sure UV sufficiently targets a desperate market. It seems UV companies target cleanrooms, hospitals, etc. but these already have tried and tested methods, especially via air filtration, for achieving low contamination. There might be some cost savings from UV, but it is not clear cut - filters are extremely cheap as they last for years. And there is industry inertia connected with doing things differently. And cleanrooms, ORs and the like have a lot of regulation one quickly gets stuck in.

Coming at this from another and admittedly subjective angle, as a parent, and talking to others, I am intrigued by the possibility of using UV as well as other disease fighting tech in nurseries/pre-schools (I think you are a parent too). This user group is certifiably desperate to be less at home with sick kids (and also to not constantly feel tired and low-energy). I just wanted to put this out there as I would be keen to support anything in this direction as long as I have availability. It should not be too expensive to test out, and at least in certain jurisdictions there is little in the way of legislation stopping something like this. On the contrary, here in Sweden where the government pays parents staying at home with sick kids, there is a push to reduce sickness in this sector of the society.

I think this is super important - criticism of those with the most power is likely to be worthwhile. Like in all politics power can "buy" and create "opinion". Then, if epistemics is something we value, we have to be super careful of the contribution money makes to truth. Just look at the people in climate change - nowadays nearly anyone can frame their pet project as a climate change intervention and they get funded, as long as they go along with the party line. And in climate change there are huge economic incentives - it is not a false claim by conservatives that many "green" investors stand to gain enormously from a change to the cleantech they invested in. If there is one thing history should have taught us it is that power corrupts and I see no robust immune system in EA against this. At the same time we have to be charitable - there are of course significant chances those with power in the movement both have pure intentions of doing good and are able to resist any influence from personal gains they stand to make from nudging the movement in certain directions.

I should maybe have made it clearer that I am speaking to a large part from my own experience. That said I have done lay reading of psychology and combined with quite consistent observations of multiple kids I feel quite sure about some claims (like the need to develop skill in when to deceit/how to build trust). Other claims I feel less certain about, like that they are more equipped than adults to not be trusted. I should probably have made it clearer how certain I was about each of the claims and what, if any, research or observations underpinned each of my claims. Thanks for holding me accountable on my epistemics! I also recognize after reading your comment that there is a lot of diversity in kids and perhaps there are kids that suffer a great deal from not being trusted, and kids that might not actually choose to engage much in deceitful behavior. And perhaps it reflects on my own failing as a parent haha!

I think there is a lot going on. For one, kids are equipped to deceive but are not equipped to learn when to deceive. So to learn how deceit/trust works in social settings they have to experiment on their parents - you often catch your kids silently raiding the candy cupboard in the kitchen. So that kind of makes you skeptical of them. Then I think there is a cultural thing where it is ok not to trust your kids that much. This I feel less sure about the validity of, but I think it is a thing. If your boss would have as little trust in you as the average parent has in their child, I think it would feel terrible (I am not insinuating anything about the author here, this is just general observations of young families). I think there is more to it too (including language as Kirsten pointed out) and kids seem to cope well even though they often do not get much trust - maybe kids are emotionally equipped to deal with not being trusted that much - they are pretty happy go lucky. And I am sure there are many more aspects I am missing, like the parents being exhausted, etc.

Perhaps, if you can get people around you to help you, I think that is helpful. If you can get your kids into not just sticking to their opinions, but themselves helping you create experiments to get at the truth, that could help. If they just said "mom, try this before we continue arguing" right out of the gate perhaps you would have realized it was true. I try to tell this to people close to me "please help me understand when I am wrong - I am often convinced by experiments or good comparisons". A recent lesson from my own life was when someone said they were tired of cleaning up after me. We then figured out that the person who cleaned up after me felt as annoyed cleaning 1 of my things as 10 of their own. This immediately changed my behavior (for me I care less about whose things I clean than how long time it takes me in total so their perspective was completely alien to me - I could not guess that someone could feel that way). Basically, just give people around you (family, colleagues) a recipe that is easy to follow on how to convince you.