I’ve been reading the biographies of moral heroes, and I’d guess ~50% of them struggled with ongoing health issues.
Being sick sucks, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to do a ton of good
It’s not everybody, but it’s a surprising percentage of them.
I myself struggle with a chronic mystery ailment and I find it inspiring to hear about all of these people who still managed to do great things, even though their bodies were not always so cooperative.
(Also, just as an aside, the book Stop Being Your Symptoms, Start Being Yourself didn’t cure my illness, but it did reduce its effects on my life by about 85%, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically CBT/psychology stuff applied to chronic illness)
What's a good heuristic for knowing if you're being self-sacrificial to the point of negative returns for the thing you're being self-sacrificial for? I'm interested in things people have actually used and found to work in practice, either for themselves or others.
There's an old Facebook group, New EA hub search and planning, that might be worth reviving in light of the incresed amount of funding coming into the space.
Even with more availability of funding, many talented folks won't get funded or will only recieve small amounts. Establishing new hubs that provide an easier entry-way to being surrounded by community seems like potentially quite high value. After all, it takes a village to raise an EA and being surrounded by others is an accelerator to impact.
Hi Vasco,
Thanks for the question and sorry for the slow reply.
The overall process was to combine two estimates of THL's cost-effectiveness through weighting them in a Guesstimate model, along with some assumptions about the speed-up time of the intervention and the marginal cost-effectiveness relative to the past average cost-effectiveness.
The more detailed steps were:
1. Gather two estimates: THL review by ACE from 2025, wherein cage-free work has an estimated 2 to 44 hens affected per dollar (best guess of 11); THL self-published report from 2025, which reports 2 hens freed per dollar spent between 2015 and 2024.
2. Make assumptions: The THL self-published report was conservative in that it didn't include a counterfactual speed up assumption. So, we assumed that the interventions THL carried out each affected 6 to 15x as many hens than reported on average through speeding up the timelines to hens becoming cage-free. Then, since the marginal cost-effectiveness in 2026 is probably much less than the average cost-effectiveness from 2015-2024, we discounted the resulting THL self-reported estimate by 70%. This is a rough guess.
3. In a Guesstimate model, I combined the two estimates (giving equal weight to each) to get an overall estimate of THL's cost-effectiveness on the margin (caveat below). (The ACE estimate was encoded as a lognormal distribution between 2 and 44 hens/$, which had a mean of 14 which is slightly better than their best-guess, which could be a median or mean, I'm not sure). This produced an estimate of 10 (3.6 to 29) hens/$. The method isn't perfect, since these estimates might not be independent so the variance could be artificially reduced, but for our initial version, we felt it was a good enough estimate (other factors matter more to the CCF).
Upon looking back, I realize that I made a typo in the methodology -- it should be 3.6 to 29 chickens per dollar spent, not 3.6 to 22. So thanks for pointing my attention to this! I've now fixed it.
On the more important question, I agree that the marginal cost-effectiveness is definitely the important question, and I'd like to have this. However, the best estimates we could find for the first version of the CCF were for average cost-effectiveness of past spending. We plan to improve upon these estimates in the future, such as through considering more evidence. If you know of any good marginal cost-effectiveness estimates, or other cost-effectiveness estimates, please do link them below!
Hope this is helpful! Also, I'll look into how to change the settings so you can copy text, I'm not sure why it's like that
I think the key thing to test is when plant based substitutes are significantly cheaper than animal products. The two examples I know of now are margarine and egg replacer. The former got big market penetration (and I think some actual substitution) and the latter didn't. As I've argued elsewhere, we could get plant based burgers to cost parity or better if we built a bigger factory. Then I think there would be some substitution for price sensitive consumers.
Thank you for writing this, Tom and Rocky. I think this is an important caution, and I appreciate the way you are framing it.
As someone directly involved in a welfare-tech-style intervention, I actually agree with much of your core argument. I also strongly believe that good tech interventions can be extremely impactful, partly for some of the reasons you outline: they can sometimes bypass certain barriers that exist for other welfare work, and they can make it possible to help very large numbers of animals relatively quickly. But I also agree that, when looked at from the outside, they can be falsely perceived as silver bullets, so I want to share three insights from SWP about electrical stunning for shrimp.
I’ve also posted a more direct response to “Animal Welfare Has an Evidence Problem,” which you refer to in the post, to clarify some of these points.
First, at SWP, our work on shrimp stunning has been much more complex than simply deploying stunners at scale. The Humane Slaughter Initiative does involve getting electrical stunning equipment used on farms, but in practice, we are doing much more than that: coordinating and funding welfare research and R&D, collecting field data, working with scientists, developing and refining slaughter protocols, iterating on the technology with existing equipment providers, negotiating with industry, engaging corporate stakeholders, building and maintaining producer relationships, training staff, educating farmers… Much of this work is not visible from the surface, but it’s central to making the intervention possible. The tech matters, but it does not operate in a vacuum.
Second, on shrimp stunning specifically, I think you captured something important. SWP entered this space aware that there were uncertainties, and we’ve been proactively trying to reduce them. Some of that work is public, but much of it happens through industry collaborations, field implementation, and producer relationships, which are often necessarily behind closed doors or covered by NDAs. That can make the work less visible from the outside, even though it is central to what we are doing.
This is one reason I think treating our intervention too simplistically, as merely putting stunners on farms, can lead to exactly the kind of disillusionment and backlash you describe.
Third, I feel some of the issues you describe are not limited to tech interventions. Many ambitious attempts to change existing systems seem to have an early phase where progress looks relatively fast, followed by a harder phase where problems become more complex, uncertainty can increase, coordination costs become bigger, and resistance from affected stakeholders becomes stronger. That does not necessarily mean the intervention – tech or otherwise – was a mistake; it can be a natural progression of an ambitious project.
Thanks again for writing this! It’s an important reminder that welfare tech can be genuinely promising and, in some cases, extremely impactful, but it should not be treated as a silver bullet.
Crossposted to LessWrong and my Substack.
Confidence level: moderate uncertainty and not that concrete (yet). Exploratory, but I think this is plausibly important and underexplored.
Early AI safety arguments often assumed we wouldn’t get meani...
I came here and had the same thought!
It seems like an important question that I haven't seen great analysis on is: if we stop or heavily pace frontier training runs and development, how much of the benefits (measured either in economics/welfare or straight capabilities) will we lose per unit time.
This is sort of vague and I would also like some help operationalizing this question. What I'm imagining is approximately as follows.
- We open source fable/astra weights (or imagine in a year some open source...
TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
I got "0 conflicts, 1 bullet bitten", with the bullet being the repugnant conclusion.
Does this mean that you have 6 bullets you'd prefer over having to bite the repugnant conclusion? :)
This is cool! Did you consider testing for the very repugnant conclusion? Maybe I'm misremembering but I don't think any of your choices tested if we can just outweigh adding suffering people by adding more happy people.
The Very Repugnant Conclusion (taken from here)
A population of arbitrarily many lives with arbitrarily high welfare is worse than a population of arbitrarily many arbitrarily negative lives plus sufficiently many “ε-lives”[1] that each have an arbitrarily small quantity of positive welfare (Figure 4.1).
Whatever you consider to be the crossing point at which a life goes from "not worth living" to "worth living", that's defined as welfare level zero. A life at welfare level 7 is worth living by definition.
Q12&Q13. I don't understand... These are comparable, right?
Some moral philosophers (Larry Temkin being the most prominent) say that if A > B, and B > C, then that doesn't necessarily mean A > C. I agree that this sounds strange but it's a view held by some people, so I wanted the quiz to allow for the possibility.
Thanks again to everyone who participated in the Cluelessness Critiques Competition!
Across several entries to the competition, I noticed a few important misunderstandings of my argument for cluelessness from unawareness (the...
At a conference on post-AGI futures earlier this year, I proposed a session titled “What’s next for impact markets?” The conference speakers included the godfather of impact markets Paul Christiano himself, and noted supporters like Scott Alexander, Oli Habryka, and Andrew Critch — so I was hopeful that there would be some...
One utopian vision for space expansion involves a libertarian explosion of diversity, with everyone and their robot setting up different sorts of societies and governance structures.[1] We might call such a future ‘galactic anarchy’.
On Earth, while there is...
This is a repost from my Substack.
There’s not enough people in AI Safety. Not for a lack of talent, but simply because there’s a bottleneck (actually, multiple) in the pipelines that funnel people between pre- and post-transition. (I get this is incredibly vague, but its not the main point of this post.)
At the same time, there are certain hubs within the field that have significant impac...
Ground-truth from a codified, civil-law jurisdiction, and a register of the failures that attack how one checks — not what the machine says.
Hello — this is my first post here, so I'll keep it to an introduction and an honest ask.
I'm an advocate in Jakarta, Indonesia. Over the past few months I've been developing what I call AI-Based Jurimetrics — a verification discipline for AI-assisted legal work in a codified, civil-law system with no binding precedent, which is a rat...
Last year, the super PAC Leading the Future raised $125 million to shape how Americans think about AI regulation. Its affiliates paid influencers $5,000 a video and ran a news operation staffed by AI agents posing as journalists. Contrast that to what happened earlier this year, when a few hundred people...
I'm wondering to what extent the way to go is less, well-coordinated communication channels (e.g. AI in Context, Species) vs getting many lower context people to make content (e.g. after taking some intro course)
Excellently put! The movement is growing slowly but surely. We have lots of work to do!
I'm early-ish in the application pipeline for a non-EA job and they're asking me to do a 20-HOUR UNPAID work test where they explicitly want to own and use the product of my "work test" ....