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...
When speaking to candidates who are considering working with us at 80,000 Hours, I often hear people worry about replaceability.
The familiar version of the worry is about whether the organisation will hire someone else in your place. If it will, then the difference you make by taking the job is only the difference between you and them.
There are a couple of well-known answers to that. The person hired in your place probably cares about the world too, and would go on to do somethi...
One of my biggest regrets in EA is not having spoken out more boldly about how one of the most pressing outreach concerns by a lot was political diversity and how major EA figures/orgs openly supporting Democratic politics as an EA intervention was a major error.
Many people might of course be sympathetic to such causes and might well support them privately, but I think it is critically important for EA to be a big tent that is mostly politically neutral, and in recent years we've lost a lot of ground there.
I have believed this and spoke out about it in minor ways and in private since seeing talk of phone banking for Hillary as an EA intervention -- which struck me as surprising misconduct at the time -- but I now think I probably should have made a bigger deal of it.
I'm not sure my speaking up would have solved things, but I regret not being more open about it since things seem to have gone really wrong on this front recently. Unfortunately, this error now seems very relevant to the current AI safety debates...