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The most recent EA survey might be a good thing to include.
Curated and popular this week
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AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
I believe that when people describe content as "best", what they usually mean is "most fun to read", which is probably not what you want. People naturally like things better when they're fun to read, or when they "feel" insightful. People enjoy reading motivational blogs, even though they're basically useless; people do not enjoy reading statistics textbooks, even though they're extremely useful. I don't believe I personally can do a good job of separating posts/articles that are important to read and ones that I enjoyed reading.
On the other hand, I cannot think of a better strategy for curating good content than asking people to submit the posts they like best. Maybe something like peer review would work better, where you get a small group of people who consciously optimize for finding valuable articles, not necessarily interesting ones?
I've thought about this some more and I have some idea of the kind of process I would use if I were trying to curate the best content in EA.
I don't trust myself to make intuitive judgments about which posts are best--I'm going to end up picking the ones that were the most fun to read. I believe I could mitigate this by creating an explicit checklist of the things I would want in a "best of" post, and then look for posts matching it.
Actually the #1 thing I'd look for in a post is, did I do substantially more good as a result of reading this post? Sometimes it's obvious how something you read helps you do good and sometimes it's more vague, but you should at least be able to say why a post substantially benefited you if you're going to nominate it as a "best of" post.
This is a pretty difficult test to pass. Some things I read that did cause me to do noticeably more good include:
None of these are from 2016 so they're not eligible. As far as I can remember, the only things I've read in 2016 that caused me to do substantially more good were charities' writeups about their own activities.
Givewell's suggested questions to ask are at their Do-It-Yourself Charity Evaluation Questions page.
Agree with this. I'm not yet sure how we'll select the best posts, but I think it will be some combination of votes and talking with experts to distill the content down.