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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...
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On October 22nd starting at 10:00am Pacific Time, Every.org is matching donations to select animal welfare organizations at a 2:1 rate, up to $2,000 per donor per nonprofit (so if you give up to $2,000, they will contribute up to $4,000 and the nonprofit will get up to $6,000). The first donation a donor makes to each eligible nonprofit will be matched, and donors can get the match for multiple $2,000 donations. So, you can get more than $2,000 matched by donating $2,000 one time to multiple...
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...
Recent opportunities to take action
Thanks for posting this question. I'll take a stab at it.
Yes, any use of AI that aims to improve society counts as AI for social good.
It's hard to know because this question is so broad - one could spend their entire life investigating it. It would be helpful to narrow down your question into something more specific, like "the projected future impact of agricultural applications of robotics on human well-being". Then you could divide agricultural applications of robotics into different use cases and predict how each use case would affect the outcome you're interested in (in this case, well-being) and how much. Also, the counterfactual impact of an individual new technology (such as robotics) is hard to isolate, because technologies are very often used together in different combinations (such as robotics + computer vision + hardware accelerators for AI + ...), and because technologies interact with other technologies and other social systems in complex ways.
Once you've narrowed down to a more specific question, you've got something you could do an entire year-long research project on. We wouldn't be able to answer your research question on the EA Forum overnight, although we may be able to point you to relevant resources if you ask a specific question.
Finally, a shameless plug: if you're interested in using AI to improve the world as effectively as possible, I invite you to join my Slack.
I hope this helps!
Also, for questions on the EA Forum, I recommend writing a short title and a longer description if needed. The current title of this post doesn't fit on the front page, so it's hard to know what your question is about before clicking on it.
Here may be a better question: Would you estimate that robotics is a good field to go into for for profit entrepreneurship that tries to make a direct impact?
Any resources from the previous questions would also be helpful, thank you!