TL;DR
NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda.
We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership wi...
This summer, 27 residents came to Berkeley for the first cohort of the Generator Residency, a three-month program for AI safety generalists run by Kairos and Constellation.
Residents receive mentorship from experienced generalists and researchers and are working on projects like running workshops for professionals entering AI safety, building a cross-org...
A tough lesson I learned over the past few years is that it’s pretty stressful to work in the “Please Don’t Build the Torment Nexus” ecosystem, especially as it increasingly seems like the world is hell-bent on building the Torment Nexus.
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Quick math: In terms of total expected suffering averted, inviting a group of friends to a barbecue where the main meat is beef is probably more impactful than eating a vegan meal by yourself.
According to Faunalytics' Animal Product Impact Scales, a serving of chicken requires approximately 10 times as many days of animal life to produce as a serving of beef (not adjusted for quality of life or moral weights). Additionally, most seafood is much, much worse than this. If this meal prevents your friends from going and eating those other foods, tricking them into eating beef will likely do more good than eating a vegan meal by yourself.
Still, this may not be as impactful as saving your money and donating it directly to impactful charities. Saving a single dollar on food and donating it to the SWP will probably do more to reduce suffering than hosting a barbecue.
Also, you might expose yourself to various forms of value drift by hosting a barbecue, but I could see this happening in a net positive (hosting more barbecues in the future) or a net negative (giving up on veganism entirely/permanently failing to convince any of your friends to give up meat) direction.