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...
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...
> TL;DR: No, but you might, if you leave it too late: We’re hiring for seven roles, and the people who join now will shape what a much bigger AIM becomes. The first step is cheap -- an expression of interest form.
My worry
I rejoined...
I enjoyed Cloud Atlas (fiction, both book and movie). It's a movie where relatively normal people did hard things because they were the right thing to do, not because movie morality entailed a just world hypothesis where good things happen to good people, or because the movie's characters were personally and emotionally invested in specific outcomes.
I think this is relatively rare in fiction, which is why I like the movie. I've told several EA friends about the movie and they liked it too.
I also watch movies about ordinary people resisting during World War II (eg, John Rabe for nonfiction and Jojo Rabbit for fiction), especially if it's from the perspective of the Axis.
+1, a lot of David Mitchell's metafiction-y books have EA vibes (huge scope, interwoven characters doing the right thing for unknown future others)