Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
On October 22nd starting at 10:00am Pacific Time, Every.org is matching donations to select animal welfare organizations at a 2:1 rate, up to $2,000 per donor per nonprofit (so if you give up to $2,000, they will contribute up to $4,000 and the nonprofit will get up to $6,000). The first donation a donor makes to each eligible nonprofit will be matched, and donors can get the match for multiple $2,000 donations. So, you can get more than $2,000 matched by donating $2,000 one time to multiple...
In community building, we often optimise for "value alignment". This seems to be used to mean lots of different things. One definition that seems reasonably correct, is that one agrees with the basic EA principles. However, I think the trait I look for in budding committee, is not necessarily this. There are members that would self describe as utilitarian, or rationalist, but don't feel excited about the prospect of a highly impactful career.
On the other hand, there are people who are excited about the EA ideas, will read posts if you mention them, have mixed but strong takes and when they're unsure, will be agentic to try things out. I think this is much more predictive of people following through on EA concepts, and isn't frequently correlated with initially agreeing with the values.