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Curated and popular this week
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Interesting question! Might the Kurzgesagt video on factory farming count as an example of this for animal welfare? If someone wants to do it again, they could try to assess what they think the video did right (and wrong) and improve upon it. Maybe some cues on messaging could be taken from Lewis Bollard's fairly successful appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast?
Also, a potential reason why AI Safety focused on it (compared to other cause areas) might be that they have pipelines which can absorb a fair amount of people, and so they find it more worthwhile to launch broad outreach that could get a few dozen counterfactual people applying to fellowships, and the like? This may less be the case for other causes when it comes to talent - I assume that for animal welfare and global health, the informal theory of change behind funding a high-quality video would be rather donation-focused. However, I could be wrong about the talent pipeline reason, and maybe some content creation funders mostly want to raise broad awareness of AI risk issues (seemed to be the case for the Future of Life Institute).