Quick reflections from EAG NYC:
Is anyone else worried about the conflicts of interest from the expected philanthropic money coming from Anthropic and OpenAI people?
It may well correlate but as Heather Browing puts it we are just "trading intutions". Values "vary widely from 0.56 to 6.05" and the only comparable low income group from IDinsight Beneficiary Preferences Survey puts it at 0.56. Revealed preferences go against this as well with suicide rate in Afghanistan lower than the global average (Although that is a bad measure it alot of ways)
Often its just worth considering that EA Wild Animal folks are massively skewed in their moral weights for suffering often to basically weighting positive experiences at near zero. AIM has some data comparing Excruciating pain to Annoying between community surveys and the literature. For the literature showing trade off people would make the ratio is more like 1 : 30 while the comunity survey is 1 : 4.5 million and Anima international folks are even more skewed at 1 : 200 million. So much of the discussion is coming from a group with very different prefences to the general population. And we don't even know what non-humans would say about this!
At 1 : 30 and a death by predation of a minute even a relatively short life can look overall worth living, at 1 :200 million for the same death even a life of 300 years looks net negative.
So a normal trade offs of pain severity, positive experiences and other goods freedom may go to explain the assocation between animal rights and pro-rewilding
I've started a living literature review on the relationship between wealth and wellbeing.
Things I've done some work on that I plan to publish more on that seem relevant to some EA conversions in global health and wellbeing :
Some less relevant things I'll work on: what does the causal evidence say about social media and mental wellbeing? -- it's somewhat bad, probably. How happy were our ancestors? -- Either about as happy as we are or, or as happy as people are in Afghanistan -- Which is to say teetering on the cusp of having negative wellbeing on average. Not sure which yet. Is it the psychology, stupid? I'm also curious to understand the psychology of populism, and if a non-material lens gives us a better sense of how to predict and maybe prevent populist driven destablization to the institutions we'll need to preserve to have any chance at governing during these wacky next few decades.
FWIW, my guess is that this will be much more expensive (though I'm extremely sympathetic to the overall post and direction). I asked one of the scientists working on shrimp stunning research because I happened to be sitting next to them when I read this post, and they guessed $4M-$6M to do the efficacy research as you describe for stunning alone. Similarly, malarial nets cost $100 of Ms over decades of development to get to the point they are at today, not including things like the RCTs to test if they worked, etc.
I think that some of these things will be worth paying for, but I think that animal advocates will need stomachs as big as their eyes for paying for research if we want to make progress on these issues (and this is part of the reason that I believe most animal welfare dollars should be going toward research).
Thanks for writing this!
The new EA Forum frontpage layout is unserious. My concern is simple: where is the list of the latest posts? The screen is so overwhelmed by "featured posts" and "comments" and "quick takes" that the centerpiece of the whole thing is completely gone. Now I can't see what is going on in EA, or whether there is something that I want to read, which defeats the point of visiting the website. And moreover, hiding such key information gives the appearance of a forum that doesn't care about supporting serious discussion, it sets the wrong tone for the community.
You can see a comparison to LessWrong and Hacker News below.
Current EA forum
Current Lesswrong
Current Hacker News