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...
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
TL;DR:
The movement has an evidence problem. To solve it, for each intervention we need to know:
* What types of evidence that intervention needs
* What types of evidence different sources can give us
In this post, we outline a framework for evidencing an intervention through five stages:
...
In addition to wreaking havoc with USAID, the rule of law, whatever little had been started in Washington about AI safety, etc., the US government has, as you all know, decided to go after trans people. I'm neither trans nor an American, but I think it's really not nice of them to do that, and I'd like to do something about it, if I can.
To some extent, of course, it's the inner deontologist within me speaking here: trans people are relatively few, arguably in less immediate danger than African children dying of AIDS, and the main reason why I feel an urge to do something is because explicitly wanting a certain group to be removed from society feels morally worse than letting them die just because you don't want to spend money on them.
But still: anyone has a good guess at what would be the most effective way for me to allocate a little bit of my time and money to this problem?