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...
You can run your own events!
(Inspired by recent discussions about exclusivity of events run by CEA.)
It is possible to run your own events, including a conference with goals similar to the EAG and EAGx event series run by the Center for Effective Altruism.
I personally think the EAG event series run by the Center for Effective Altruism is pretty great, and that the space of EAG-like events is probably far from saturated. Here are some brief pointers to arguments, which I'm happy to expand on if anyone is interested:
- competitive markets for attendance/attention lead to diversity / positive-sum differentiation
- more is better (put differently, the market is labor-constrained) -- if individuals think attending your conference will add value for them, then you probably add value overall by running it
- different people may have different advantages in their organizing ability. If you live in Africa, then your understanding, connections, and legal status in your city and country make are valuable edge in the project of running a geographically African conference.