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...
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...
I have found it useful and interesting to build a habit of noticing an intuition and then thinking of arguments for why that intuition is worth listening to. It has caused me to find some pretty interesting dynamics that it seems like naive consequentialists/utilitarians aren't aware of.
One concern about this is that you might be able to find arguments for any conclusion that you seek out arguments for; the counter to this is that your intuition doesn't give random answers, and is actually fairly reliably correct, hence explicit arguments that explain your intuition are some amount more likely than random to correspond reality, making these arguments useful to discover.
This definitely goes better if you are aware of the systematic errors your intuition can make (i.e. cognitive biases).
Is there a context for the type of things you are using your intuition for?