Thought to share some infographics on animal advocacy org expenses from the Stray Dog Institute's 2024 State of the Movement report, which I learned about via Moritz's excellent post.  Most org spending is in North America and Europe:  North American and European orgs accounted for most of the spend in sub-Saharan Africa and LATAM & the Caribbean, despite spending (say) only ~1% of their total expenses in SSA:  I don't have any good sense of how this Global North-dominated funding potentially skews priorities, but this drill down by animal category may be a start: As well as this drill down by intended outcome. Naively it seems that SSA's allocation looks like North America's for instance, except that the latter has a greater proportion of org spending going to increasing availability of animal-free products, which makes sense given relative wealth: For what it's worth, here's what the funding allocations look like for animal categories as a whole: mostly terrestrial animals, mostly farmed. I'd be keen to get takes from folks in the know on what seems underfunded here. Farmed insects jump out: just $135k out of $260m overall (~0.05%) seems nuts. I also wonder about the skewing of priorities due to outside funding. Moritz wrote which I agree with; another angle is Tom & Karthik's point that although it also isn't clear to me from the infographics above whether meaningful change in their sense would be reflected in the drill downs.

I have twice recently "gently counseled" people on EA forum norms when they come in, in my opinion, a little too hot for this rather cool medium 😃 is there something official/CEA-endorsed on this subject? If not, should I/someone write it? I could point them to Scout Mindset but that's kind of a high barrier to entry. 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no 

The positive media storm for Anthropic is bigger than I thought it would be.  Almost every major news network has featured them and almost all of it puts a halo on Amodei (which feels a bit icky but hey). And every 4th post on my linkedin is along the lines of "Claude hits no. 1 on App store" "the idea that no big tech has morals is dead," "my 3 year love affair with GPT Is over" "I made the switch to Claude and I'll never look back" As much as refusing the govt. contact might delay their IPO and give their valuation a temporary hit, they could hardly have hoped for a better PR flood. Every new user that switches more only helps them but hurts their biggest competitor. It's also good timing for them because right now their product is probably better than Open AI's which wasn't the case a year ago and might not be the case 6 months from now. It's still unclear whether this will be a good business decision as well as a "moral" one but I suspect it will.

[Crossposted from social media, in the spirit of Draft Amnesty Week] After a lot of thinking, I am updating my Giving What We Can🔸10% donation allocation, shifting about a third of my donation portfolio to the Center for Land Economics 🔰. There are several reasons why I am excited about this donation opportunity. I believe that Georgism has the potential to radically transform our economy and society. 'Land is a Big Deal', as they say. Raising public funds without deadweight costs is a big part of this. But more fundamentally, by reducing the costs of living and the role of rent-seeking, I hope that it could shift our society from scarcity and zero-sum thinking to abundance and positive-sum collaboration. Within this cause area, I believe that CLE is the most cost-effective donation opportunity. In their first year, they have achieved much more tangible benefits than I would have anticipated, and seeing this change has made me much more optimistic about the prospects for Georgist reform today than I was a year ago. They combine an incremental approach of giving legislators and tax assessors the tools necessary to improve the situation on the ground, with movement building and consistent high-quality public outreach through the Progress & Poverty Substack. And they have done this with a small but dedicated team, with only 1 funded FTE. This means that my donations, as a small, private donor, will actually constitute a few percentage points of their annual budget. It is rare to ever have the opportunity to make such a counterfactual difference. We can often have the most impactful donation opportunities in areas where we have access to idiosyncratic information that is not yet widely recognized by the wider 'donation market'. In my case, I think that the world severely under-appreciates the potential of Georgist reform generally, and the work of CLE specifically. However, such idiosyncratic information can often be connected to unusual interests, which often comes w